| Jeff Jacoby is an ass hat. He wrote a highly reprehensible op-ed piece in the Boston Globe yesterday about sex selection abortions. His question is "How exactly are American women empowered when abortion is deployed to prevent the existence of American girls?" He then proceeds to regurgitate a lot of statistics about how prevalent sex selection abortions are in countries like Vietnam, India and China. When he finally gets around to mentioning these kinds of abortions in the US, the numbers seem suspicious: "Almond and Edlund examined the ratio of boys to girls among US children born to Chinese, Korean, and Indian parents. For the first children of these Asian-American families, the sex ratio was the normal 1.05-to-1. But when the first baby is a girl, the odds of the second being a boy rose to 1.17-to-1. After two sisters, the likelihood of the third being a son leaped to 1.51-to-1. This is clear "evidence of sex selection, most likely at the prenatal stage," the authors write. Prenatal sex tests for pregnant women are now available earlier, more cheaply, and more conveniently than ever, "raising the prospect of sex selection becoming more widely practiced in the near future."
Am I wrong in thinking that the likelihood that people that have mulitple children are more likely to have boys somewhere in there? Plus, it would be completely wrong to legislate one kind of abortion and not another. With abortion, there is always moral ambiguitiy which should be left to the person having the abortion to decide. Trust women to make the choice that is right for them. He concludes with: "But nothing can excuse such abortions in the United States - nothing except the theology of "choice," which elevates the right to an abortion above all other considerations. You don't have to be a feminist to know that being a girl is not a birth defect, or to be horrified by a practice that lethally reinforces the most benighted forms of sexual discrimination. For what kind of feminist would it be who could contemplate the use of abortion to eliminate ever-greater numbers of girls, and not cry out in horror?"
I've pretty much resigned myself to the fact that at least half of the abortions performed are probably girls. It doesn't make me horrified, or irate, or anything really. It makes me grateful that I live in a country where I have the right to choose, for whatever reason, to terminate an unwanted pregnancy. The right to an abortion should be elevated above moral ambiguity. After all, we do live in the "Land of the Free" except for women, minorities, and the poor I mean. |
