Sex Selection Abortion

 

“Gendercide”: the “great silent crime of the 21st century”?

By Dave Andrusko
We’ve often speculated which aspects of the battle to save millions of innocent babies are most likely to move people out of the status of non-combatant and into the ranks of the greatest movement for

social justice

of our time. Certainly near the very top is an awareness that by 20 weeks (if not earlier), there is compelling scientific evidence the unborn child can experience excruciating pain as she is aborted.
But potentially there is another hugely important phase of the fight that is ever-so-gradually making its way into the public arena– “gendercide”—sex-selective abortions and other techniques that almost always target unborn females.
I was reminded of that today when I read an editorial in the British newspaper, The Telegraph, “Unnatural selection.”
Yet, alas, much of the brief editorial is less-than-edifying.

“But there is no suggestion that gender-based abortion is widespread, or normalised. If anything, as Dr Daniel Potter now claims, British couples are less keen on boys: of those who fly out to his US clinic for sex-selective IVF treatment, eight out of 10 go for girls.”

This avoids the evidence from virtually everywhere on the planet that overwhelmingly—and I do mean overwhelmingly—when the decision is made based on the child’s sex, it is girls who are (as one publication put it) “culled.”

There are hundreds of millions of “missing girls,” meaning females whose lives were taken usually because an ultrasound identified the baby as a she, not a he. In addition, there is considerable evidence that this preference for boys over girls is being brought to North America with emigrants from cultures where females are simply not valued.

And even if Dr. Potter was marginally accurate, are we supposed to conclude that it is “better” if it is male babies created via IVF who are eliminated rather than female?
“Still, the fact that the numbers visiting Dr Potter are increasing sharply shows that lawmakers need to remain watchful.” Ah, yes, they do!

The editorial (sort of) weighs in against widespread “tinkering” with human embryos, even as it congratulates Britain for having “a good record in terms of choosing which techniques to adopt and which to prohibit.”

So, what are “good” techniques? The editorial begins with this stirring call to arms: “’Gendercide’ is, for many, the great silent crime of the 21st century.” So, presumably, eliminating babies based on their gender is wholly unacceptable, right?
Maybe yes, maybe not. The editorial’s position on selecting between “embryos” as opposed to what it calls “in-utero abortion” is less clear. So, for example, if the baby’s sex could be determined very early…what?

The editorial meanders around “negative” eugenics—eliminating babies because they have this or that chromosomal anomaly. But, as been shown in Great Britain for over 45 years, anomalies can be as trivial as a cleft palate and the baby can be aborted up to birth under the notorious “Ground E” of the 1967 Abortion Act. (The word eugenics is not used, but that, of course, is what is at work.)
Ditto for “positive eugenics”—“dictating certain traits,” for example, intelligence and appearance– “and discriminating against others,” in the words of the editorial. In either case, the young human being is eliminated because he or she “fails” to meet a certain arbitrary criteria.

The irony of the whole piece is found in the second paragraph: The Daily Telegraph “expose[d] the willingness of abortion clinics to break the abortion rules for women who wanted a male child.”
Yet here, its editorial page is wishy-washy on a whole panoply of related discriminatory practices that target unborn human beings.
They should read their news stories a lot more closely

Source: NRLC News