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India Tries to Stop Sex-Selective Abortions
NEW DELHI, July 14 (AP) — Indian women would be required to register their pregnancies and seek government permission for abortions under a proposal intended to curb abortions of female fetuses in the country, where boys are traditionally preferred. “This will help to check both feticide and infant mortality,” said Renuka Chowdhury, India’s minister for women and child development. “With this, mysterious abortions will become difficult.” An editorial in The Times of India on Saturday derided the proposal as “ridiculous,” saying that fetal gender screening is already a criminal offense that is not strictly enforced. Boys are preferred because they do not require the enormous dowry payments that bankrupt many poor families when their daughters marry. “In the name of protecting the girl child, the state must not fall into the trap of disempowering women,” the editorial said. Abortions have been legal in India since 1971 and are viewed as a way to curb runaway population growth, but facilities to perform them are limited, and rural women often resort to unsafe abortions. Gender-based abortions have been illegal since 1994. Ms. Chowdhury told The Hindustan Times that women would only be allowed to have an abortion when there is a “valid and acceptable reason,” but she did not elaborate. Last year, a study by The Lancet, the British medical journal, reported that up to 500,000 female fetuses are aborted each year in India, leading to the birth of nearly 10 million fewer girls over the past two decades. Experts say that sex-selective abortions in India reduced the number of girls per 1,000 boys from 945 in 1991 to 927 in 2001.
China bans selective abortion to fix imbalance China will strictly ban selective abortion of female
foetuses in an attempt to reverse a gender imbalance in the ratio of
newborn boys to girls, official said Thursday.
In China 117 boys are born for every 100 girls, according to the
latest statistics, the Xinhua news agency said. A normal newborn sex ratio is
103-107 boys for 100 girls.
Senior family planning official Zhao Baige said the government plans to
reverse the imbalance by 2010 by banning sex-selective abortion and launching
campaigns to end the tradition of valuing boys more than girls.
"Any individual or
medical organisation offering illegal sex-selective abortion services will take legal responsibility," Zhao
said.
Zhao blamed the imbalance on the traditional preference
for boys, which remains strong in the countryside despite campaigns emphasising
sex equality, and a poor rural social security
system which forces people to become dependent on their children in old
age.
Zhao's commission is undertaking a national "Care for Girls"
project to educate people to give up their traditional preference for male
children.
Additionally, parents who have two girls, as well as one-child parents and
those with a disabled child, will be given 1,200 yuan (US$144) by the central
government annually when they reached 60 years old in some rural pilot project
areas.
The pilot project is expected to be spread to all of China next year.
This project will also help China to set up a comprehensive social assurance
system for helping one-child families better look after parents in an aging
society.
According to statistics in 2000, China has 88.3 million people over 65, who
account for 7 per cent of the total population.
In Chinese rural areas, the majority of the old parents still depend on
support from their children instead of an unestablished national social
assurance system.
President Hu Jintao earlier this year said that bringing China's newborn sex
ratio back to a normal level had become one of the country's important goals in
the coming 10 years, Xinhua said.
The arrival of new technologies, especially ultrasound scanning, has made it possible for Chinese
couples to know the sex of their unborn baby and, in many cases, have an
abortion if it was a girl.
Only seven provinces and regions have a
normal newborn sex ratio, namely Inner Mongolia, Heilongjiang, Guizhou,
Tibet, Ningxia, Qinghai and Xinjiang, which are mostly home to ethnic minorities.
The other 24 provinces, regions and municipalities all have a sex
ratio of more than 110 boys to 100 girls.
The gender imbalance has led to warnings that millions
of Chinese men will be unable to find partners in coming decades and led to a
major problem with trafficking in women and children.
China Bans Sex-selection Abortion
The regulation, jointly issued by the State Commission for Population and Family Planning, the Ministry of Health and the State Food and Drug Administration, aims to discourage the discriminatory practice of giving preference to male babies over females, Friday's Beijing Daily reported.
According to the regulation, determining the sex of the fetus and then aborting can only be done for medical reasons. No medical organizations or persons are allowed to do so for other reasons or without approval from health departments.
Traditionally in China, boys were more welcome than girls because boys were considered the ones who would carry on the ancestral line. In the past years in some areas, especially rural areas, families would choose to abort to keep only boys.
According to the new regulation, the local health administration department will decide the names of hospitals qualified to perform sex-determining exams and abortions.
When determining the sex of the fetus, the hospital must set up a team of at least three experts. Doctors who perform the procedure must also verify the name of the pregnant woman and have the certificate of diagnosis and other related papers before the abortion.
Abortion-inducing medicine can only be used in the designated hospitals and family planning departments, said the regulation.
The regulation also clarified the punishment for those who violate the regulation.
(Xinhua News Agency March 22, 2003)
Ban Sex-Selective Abortions
A classic case of conflicting principles exists in the case of sex-selective abortions. One horn of the dilemma has the "women's movement" enshrining the right to abortion as fundamental. The other horn of this dilemma is the indisputable fact that this "right" is consistently used against women. Women are victimized in many ways because of our societal, cultural and legal treatment of abortion, but most notably in the case of sex-selective abortion. These are abortions in which the fetus is destroyed solely because it is a little boy or a little girl. Females are affected disproportionately worldwide because of sex-selective abortions.
Sex-selective abortions should be outlawed in the United States of America by vote of Congress. A process which rests entirely on discrimination has no place in the United States. If the law is challenged in court, let it be challenged. For the issue of sex-selective abortion, as for many other human rights issues, the largest hurdle to overcome is ignorance. A public debate over sex-selective abortion will produce much-needed dialogue and reach the majority of Americans who feel that abortion is wrong but should not be outlawed in all cases.
Abortion for sex-selection is wrong. But, it follows from the philosophy which underlies abortion in the United States. Our country, according to Harvard Law Professor Mary Ann Glendon, has the most permissive abortion laws of any Western country.
Many consider the untrammeled exercise of the right to abortion as of paramount importance in maintaining gender equity and "reproductive freedom". In fact, the opposite is true. Without restrictions on "choice", gender equity is among the first victims.
Sunday's New York Times magazine contained a large section devoted to China. A small paragraph on page 27 read, "There are now 40 million more males than females in China, and that surplus is not expected to diminish substantially. Male babies continue to be more desired, and an estimated 12 percent of females never enter the population because of sex-selective abortion and infanticide." Read it again--males are desired more; females are aborted more.
Where is the chorus of human rights voices? Silent. Where are prominent feminists objecting to this blinding injustice? Silent. Perhaps they are scared of limiting "choice". Perhaps they consider that aborting females solely because of their gender is a lesser evil than restricting the "right" which they have elevated and promoted. Perhaps they do not see anything wrong with it at all. We will never know what they think, because they remain in a state of denial.
But, you say, that's China. Sex-selective abortions may happen over there, but not here. In the United States, we are better than that. We would never allow such blatant discrimination. We know better. We would speak out against this clear evil if it existed in our more enlightened country.
Try again. A worldwide trend of sex-selective abortion coupled with discrimination against female infants wipes out thousands upon thousands of females each year.
The United States is guilty. In our progressive, rational, liberal-minded country, roughly 42 percent of all baby girls are aborted, whereas only 25 percent of all baby boys are aborted. In other words, if you are a female in the fetal stage, you have little more than half a chance of making it out of the womb.
We can and we should outlaw sex-selective abortion in the United States. We must open our eyes -- ignorance is not bliss. Babies are aborted because they are not boys every day in the United States. Each day that passes without legislation against sex-selective abortion is another day in which females continue to disappear from the world's population.
China Announces That It Will Criminalize Sex-Selection Abortions: Chinese law prohibits sex-selection abortions - that is, abortions performed because the parents would prefer to have a child of the other sex. (In China, it is virtually always a female fetus that is aborted.) Chinese law also prohibits ultrasound scans to determine the sex of a fetus. But recently, the Chinese government reportedly announced a plan to go further -- and criminalize abortions and ultrasounds obtained for sex-selection purposes, in the hopes that criminalization will prove more successful in curbing these practices. Such criminal laws in China arise out of the country's particular population policies and the reactions of Chinese families to those policies. The question of sex-selection abortion, however, is not unique to China, even if the context for the criminal law there may be. In the United States and elsewhere, there are those who would selectively abort a fetus of one sex or the other. What, if anything, ought the law to do about that? China: The Cultural and Legal Context For Sex-Selection Abortion China's one-child policy is an essential ingredient in any analysis of the Chinese criminal laws under discussion. For twenty-five years, Chinese families have been limited to one baby each. This policy represents an effort by the country to cope with an alarming birth rate that threatens to produce a Malthusian nightmare of extreme poverty, widespread starvation, and ultimately, dangerously high death rates. Pursuant to Chinese custom, men support their parents as they age, while women care for their husbands' parents. For this reason, the couple that may only have one child understandably wants that child to be male. As a result, a variety of practices have developed in China, including female infanticide (in which girl babies are killed at birth) and female child abandonment. With the wider availability of genetic testing prior to birth has come an additional practice - sex-selection abortion. As a result of these varied reactions to the one-child policy, China's younger generations will have too many men, relative to women. Right now, there are about 120 male births for every 100 female births in China, and the ratio is 130 to 100 or higher in some provinces. The disparity appears, moreover, only to be increasing over time. Some project that there will be 40 million unmarried men in mainland China by the year 2020. Historically, extreme violence -- including war, kidnapping, and rape -- have accompanied such a surplus of unmarried men. Perhaps partly for this reason, China has seen a sharp rise in violent crime over the past ten years.
It would be no exaggeration to say that every one of these developments leading up to the planned criminalization of sex-selection abortions, is tragic and extremely disturbing. Overpopulation, infanticide, child abandonment, sex-selection abortion, and serious disparities in sex ratios, in China, all reflect extreme circumstances, including a level of poverty that few people in the United States can even imagine. Rather than attempt to judge the behavior that occurs under such circumstances, I will therefore turn my attention to the simpler dilemma of sex-selection abortion in the United States. Why the Sex-Selection Abortion Dilemma May Be Simpler In the United States A few facts about this country change the equities a bit when we assess sex-selection abortion in the United States. First, the U.S. does not systematically produce more (or fewer) men than women. For a variety of reasons -- no doubt including the relative wealth here, the existence of a social safety net for the elderly in this country (at least pending proposed Republican "reforms"), and the modern blurring of sex role differentiation -- the people who are intent on having a girl seem to balance, numerically, the people whose hearts are set on a son. As a result, the practice of sex-selection abortion does not threaten to destabilize the population here, as it does in China, even if it happens regularly. In addition, U.S. law traditionally protects reproductive freedom. As our Supreme Court precedents currently define it, that means that people have a legal right to have as many children as they physically can have and to prevent or terminate as many pregnancies as they are able to prevent or terminate (at least prior to fetal viability). Because of this legal tradition, a criminal ban on sex-selection abortion would appear to violate basic legal norms in this country. In short, it would seem that the case for prohibiting sex-selection abortions in the United States is quite weak. Such abortions do not pose a grave threat to the population as a whole, and a ban on the procedure would, on its face, limit reproductive choice. Is the Issue of Sex-Selection Abortion in the U.S. Really as Simple as It Seems? For many readers, however, even those who are pro-choice, the matter may not appear quite so simple. Two norms in the United States press against a right to sex-selection abortion: one is an equality norm, and the other is a belief -- shared by many who support abortion rights -- that terminating a pregnancy is a serious act that must not be undertaken for affirmatively bad reasons. From the perspective of these two sets of values, the absence in the U.S. of the population concerns that drive policymaking in China does not necessarily dictate a different result here as to the legitimacy of a criminal sex-selection abortion ban. Consider, first, the equality norm. In the United States, federal and state laws prohibit discrimination on the basis of a variety of attributes, including sex. The law of discrimination notably does not, however, govern one's intimate associations. And pregnancy is undoubtedly among the most physically intimate associations that two human beings can have with each other. Nonetheless, our laws prohibiting discrimination do reflect a strong resistance to the sort of decision necessarily involved in a sex-selection abortion: the decision to kill a developing child because he or she is not the "right" sex. To kill someone because of his or her sex is, in some sense, a hate crime. And our criminal laws have recently tended to punish hate crimes more severely than others. Furthermore, on a moral and philosophical level, the very foundation of reproductive freedom is in tension with the practice of sex-based abortion. One underlying reason that people have fought for reproductive freedom is to protect women from having the onerous and painful burdens of pregnancy forced upon them alone. The three-Justice plurality opinion said it well in Planned Parenthood v. Casey: The mother who carries a child to full term is subject to anxieties, to physical constraints, to pain that only she must bear. That these sacrifices have from the beginning of the human race been endured by woman with a pride that ennobles her in the eyes of others and gives to the infant a bond of love cannot alone be grounds for the State to insist she make the sacrifice. Her suffering is too intimate and personal for the State to insist, without more, upon its own vision of the woman's role, however dominant that vision has been in the course of our history and our culture. The destiny of the woman must be shaped to a large extent on her own conception of her spiritual imperatives and her place in society. Because sex-selection abortion is itself a species of sex discrimination, those who support reproductive choice as a matter of gender equality are not very well situated to defend the practice of sex-selection abortion. In addition to representing a particularly violent example of sex discrimination, moreover, sex-selection abortions in this country indulge the most trivial sort of preference at the cost of a developing being who would otherwise be welcome. Sex-selection abortion is, in other words, the sort of abortion that provides fodder for those who would outlaw the procedure altogether: an abortion for a very bad reason. Given the various competing considerations, it is likely that existing and future bans on sex-selection abortions would provoke little opposition in the United States. Indeed, in Planned Parenthood v. Casey, the Supreme Court's 1992 decision reaffirming the core holding of Roe v. Wade, the plaintiffs did not even challenge the provision of the Pennsylvania law that prohibited sex-selection abortion. Though sex-selection abortions may not destabilize the population, and though reproductive choice is a protected freedom in this country, the individual woman's interest at stake in a sex-selection abortion accordingly seems unimportant, while the countervailing harm appears grave. As in China, though for different reasons, a ban on sex-selection abortions thus might seem to strike a reasonable accommodation between the various interests -- both weighty and weak -- that appropriately make their way into this calculus. The Problem with Investigating a Woman's Reasons for Abortion As we have seen, most people can agree that there is no right to choose the sex of one's offspring and - accordingly - no right to sex-selection abortions. Nonetheless, a criminal law prohibiting the procedure could still raise serious difficulties for reproductive freedom in this country. Consider the enforcement of such a law. If police suspected a woman of having had a sex-selection abortion, they could subject her to the sort of interrogation that might ordinarily accompany a homicide investigation. Conversations that she might have had with friends about her hope for a girl or a boy would be subject to discovery. And the government could scrutinize her treatment of any existing children as well: Does she, for example, favor her daughters over her sons, or vice-versa? Even if a woman accused of wrongful abortion were found "innocent" after this investigation, the fact of her abortion would have become public knowledge, and she would have suffered the stigma that attaches to this procedure (even when obtained for medically sound reasons). Also, because it may often be difficult for a person to establish her reasons for terminating a pregnancy, the prospect of a criminal accusation could place a serious chill on the exercise of the right to choice, even for women who have no preference for male or female offspring. In the end, our moral instincts here may have to remain legally unenforceable. Morally, the decision to terminate a pregnancy on the basis of a baby's sex may be an ugly decision that deserves no protection. But the reality is that the reproductive rights of women who would never abort on the basis of sex depend on the government's staying out of the decision altogether. If a woman has a right not to be pregnant and a right not to remain pregnant against her will, a consequence of those rights - if they are to be truly protected - is that the government may not pry into her reasons for an abortion. We must hope, instead, that women will prove worthy of the trust and responsibility that is placed in their hands, even as we refrain from finding out whether that trust is warranted.
The judgement is historical
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