Sex Selection Abortion

 

New UN Report Warns of Dangers of Prenatal Sex Selection, massive loss of female babies

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Editor’s note. The following analysis was provided by the Parliamentary Network for Critical Issues.
A new report by UNFPA’s office for Eastern Europe and Central Asia reveals that an estimated 171,000 girls are ‘missing’ in South Caucasus and parts of South-East Europe while there is a growing surplus of men.
Preventing gender-biased sex selection in Eastern Europe and Central Asia contains a dire message of concern on the anticipated impact of the destruction of unborn baby girls and distorted sex ratios:

“Sex imbalances at birth will also translate two decades on into a surplus of men, a demographic imbalance likely to affect their marriage prospects and one with the potential to increase human trafficking, crime, gender-based violence, and political unrest in severely affected regions.”

The report demonstrates that countries experiencing the harmful consequences of this disastrous population control tool–devised by population control activists not only to reduce births by destroying unborn baby girls but to eliminate future mothers– need to take action to stop the practice which often stems from a cultural preference for boys.

The 2011 resolution passed by the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe on Prenatal Sex Selection is credited in part as a reason for growing actions for awareness and efforts to stop it.
The resolution brought attention to the fact that prenatal sex selection has resulted in unbalanced sex ratios in Albania, Armenia, Azerbaijan, and Georgia where the sex ratios at birth varied from 111-112 boys for 100 girls. It condemned the practice “as a phenomenon which finds its roots in a culture of gender inequality and reinforces a climate of violence against women, contrary to the values upheld by the Council of Europe.”

As in the UNFPA report, the Resolution warned Member States of the social consequences of prenatal sex selection, “namely population imbalances which are likely to create difficulties for men to find spouses, lead to serious human rights violations such as forced prostitution, trafficking for the purposes of marriage or sexual exploitation, and contribute to a rise in criminality and social unrest.”
Included in a list of suggested actions was a call for Member States to “introduce legislation with a view to prohibiting sex selection in the context of assisted reproduction technologies and legal abortion, except when it is justified to avoid a serious hereditary disease”.

The UNFPA report describes how abortion, especially the use of abortion pills, is used to fuel this extreme act of gender discrimination:

“Abortion, which has long served as a standard family planning method, is now also used as a way to avoid female births. More recently, the emergence and misuse in the region of medical abortion pills and of assisted reproduction technologies may offer new ways for couples to practice sex selection, further fuelling discriminatory behaviour.”

This new report describes legal bans on sex selection abortions, on technology for sex determination, and on advertisements for such technology as “obvious policy options for targeting prenatal discriminatory behavior” and states that such bans “send a clear signal of governments’ official position towards sex selection and provide a basis for inter-ministry cooperation around issues of gender discrimination.”

However, pro-abortion politics is injected into the report as it also states that bans on sex selection abortion can have a “risk of infringing on reproductive rights.”
The UNFPA report accurately notes how the outcome document of the ICPD [International Conference on Population and Development] meeting in Cairo called for the elimination of prenatal sex selection and female infanticide:

“The ICPD Programme of Action adopted by 179 countries in 1994 aims in particular at ‘[eliminating] all forms of discrimination against the girl child and the root causes of son preference, which results in harmful and unethical practices regarding female infanticide and prenatal sex selection’.”

It is regrettable that at the recent UN meeting of the Commission on Population and Development the controversial outcome document made no mention of the need to stop the violence and discrimination of sex selection abortion and completely ignored the war on unborn baby girls.

Source: NRLC News