I've been ranting on Twitter. This is usually a good sign that I ought to write something more considered, where my view can be expanded more fully.
The Moral Maze on radio 4 often provides interesting food for thought on controversial issues, but today's programme on the issue of sex selective abortion was, on occasion making me want to throw things at the radio. The problem is I already know a reasonable amount about the issue, having read a book* about it and having had several in depth discussions about it with Mike, who is a renowned troll and forces me to justify even reasonable viewpoints. The discussion on the Moral Maze didn't cover half of the issues that the selective abortion of female foetuses presents.
I feel I ought to start by explaining my view on abortion prior to becoming aware of this issue. I have long thought of myself as politically pro-choice, while personally pro-life. In other words, I think a woman has a right to choose whether or not to keep a pregnancy, but I doubt I could ever -choose- to abort a child myself. Obviously there's no way I can really know unless I'm put in those circumstances. I do have a problem with aborting late, when its possible a foetus could survive outside the womb. I am slightly more fuzzy on when that cut-off should be.
I find attempts by fundamentalist religious organisations to deprive women of the right to autonomy over their bodies very worrying. It sets a dangerous precedent that women are basically baby-making factories with no right to choose when or how to have a child if they have the audacity to want a sex-life. Yes it would be nice if contraception was universally available, affordable and 100% effective, but life isn't like that. I am very lucky that I live in a country where the contraceptive pill is available on the NHS for free, and condoms are readily available in supermarkets. It's not like this everywhere.
If most of the present Republican candidates had their way (as I understand it) women's rights to contraception, let alone abortion in the US would be significantly reduced. I'm not going to get into that because this was not the purpose of this post, but suffice it to say that I fear a Republican president this time round would be detrimental to women and women's rights all around the world.
This somewhat simplified view of mine would be fine if it weren't for the pesky tendency of real life to be more complicated than that. Women don't just have abortions for reasons my moral framework sees as justifiable - rape, poverty, inability to support a child, and, to a lesser degree, the desire for a career before having children. Women sometimes have abortions for reasons that I find truly upsetting. If the technology were readily available, I believe there are women (or indeed couples) who would abort (or use fertility techniques to select against) foetuses on grounds as frivolous as hair or eye colour, IQ etc. There's a 1997 film called Gattaca about where that might lead, and it's not a world I like the look of.
The issue I wish to discuss today is women aborting foetuses on the basis of gender. It is, of course, not unheard of for a woman to abort a foetus because it is male, but it is far more likely in most countries that if a foetus is aborted because of its gender, it will be because it is female.
Girls can be aborted for various and complicated reasons, many having to do with the low status of women in developing countries and boys being prized for their ability to support their parents in later years, and to carry on the family name. Boys can be a status symbol in many countries. In parts of China it is considered so important to have a boy that, in combination with the One Child Policy it causes women to abort foetus after foetus until finally they produce one of the right gender. This has led to a sex ratio (boys per 100 girls at birth) of in the region of 150 in some areas.
Perhaps the most worrying reason, because it is, on the face of it, so reasonable, is the concept of 'family balancing'. This is where couples, having had one child, will abort pregnancies of the same gender because they want both a boy and a girl. The problem with this (apart from the obvious frivolity of the reasoning) is that all boy families are apparently less of a problem than all girl ones, so that families starting with a boy baby are less likely to abort future male foetuses than families starting with a girl baby are to abort future female foetuses. Within a family it might seem as though the gender balance is being maintained, but across a population vastly more girls are being aborted than boys.
So what?
Well a society with notably more boys than girls in it can have many negative effects. For starters when the generation reaches adulthood you get a generation of surplus men. There aren't enough women to go around, and so, with the increased demand, prostitution rises, female trafficking rises, and men who can afford to are more likely marry younger women or to go abroad and buy a wife. None of this is conducive to improving the status of women.
You might think that it would be self-correcting, that a lack of women in one generation might increase their value and make them less likely to be aborted in future generations, but for the aforementioned reasons, the trend in this situation is for relatively wealthy men to pair up with poorer women, so the increased demand is for lower status women, thus low status families may keep girls for what they might bring monetarily through their sale, while wealthy families continue to prize boys. The net effect is for women to become poorer.
Another effect is that those young men who cannot afford to buy a bride and whose female peers are marrying older men often become angry and disenfranchised. There is scientific research that shows that marriage and parenthood can reduce testosterone levels in men, and, combined with the gradual decline of testosterone levels from a man's early 20s means that this generation of young unmarried frustrated men are also at the peak of their lifetime testosterone levels. A society overflowing with angry young testosterone fuelled single men has a propensity towards conflict and unrest (see the wild west in the USA). Perhaps it's a Malthusian thing. Excess men make a society more likely to go to war and get those young men killed. That's probably an oversimplification, but the point stands. A society with too many men is not a very nice place to live.
If you accept that aborting girls leads to too many men, and that badness ensues, then the question becomes how can this be prevented? You could just ban all abortion, but as mentioned I am pro-choice, and this doesn't sit well with me. Besides, a ban would just drive abortion underground and put women at greater risk.
You could ban abortion on the basis of gender, but how do you police that? Even if you could ensure that abortion providers didn't knowingly carry out sex selective abortion (which would be tricky), what's to stop a woman finding out the sex from one doctor and then going to another doctor for an abortion with a made up reason?
You could ban the medical profession from revealing the gender of the foetus, but there a number of obstacles to this. Firstly, if there is a demand for it, someone will make it available at a price. People will take bribes. Secondly, technology is increasingly available that can identify the sex by sending off a blood sample, also ultrasound is getting so clear that not telling the sex is moot because it is obvious to a layperson on the screen. Thirdly, many couples just want to know whether they're having a boy or a girl, with no ulterior motive. Is it fair to deny them that information just because some people might misuse it?
You could campaign to improve the perception of girls and women so that people are less likely to abort them. While it would be lovely for this to be the entire solution, I don't believe that it is effective enough. Generations of prejudice aren't going to go away because of a poster campaign.
I don't know what the answer is. I am beginning to think it might be necessary to prohibit abortion after the point at which gender is identifiable, but the feminist in me revolts against this.
My position on abortion has changed subtly since looking into this subject. As I tweeted at the end of my rant earlier, basically I am pro-choice if the decision is based on the woman's circumstances. While she knows nothing about the foetus it is up to her if she keeps it, but the moment any (non health related) characteristic of the unborn child becomes a deciding factor in an abortion I don't think it should be allowed. That way be be eugenicsey dragons.
As gynaecologist Puneet Bedi is quoted as saying in the book I've been reading:
"You can choose whether to be a parent. But once you choose to be a parent you cannot choose whether it's a boy or girl, black or white, tall or short."
*The book I mentioned is called Unnatural Selection: Choosing Boys Over Girls, and the Consequences of a World Full of Men, by Mara Hvistendahl. It's a very interesting, well researched book, and I recommend it.
