An article in the National Post today highlights an issue in North America that grows larger by the day. It’s called sex-selective abortion, or otherwise known as gendercide, one of the reasons that large portions of Asia are imbalancing the natural male to female ratio by killing female fetuses. And the immigrants from countries that practice this atrocity constitute the two largest ethnic groups coming here: Chinese and Indians.
We’ve known about gendercide for a while now, but largely ignored it because the practice was being done outside of Canada. Things that happen beyond our borders bother us less than when they happen in our own backyard. But the idea that Asians are coming here to perform sex-specific abortions isn’t just something that can be ignored. Particularly when it begins to affect us because of our need and craven desire to treat all cultures equally.
Canadians, as much as we are changing each and every year, have traditionally had no history of sex-selective abortion. When technology came along that enabled us to determine the sex of a fetus, we accepted the technology as a boon to society, not as a tool to end the life of girls. And while it can be said that abortion has a solid history of practice in Canada, it has never been due to cultural hangups about the relative value of women in our society.
The concept of murdering women is morally repugnant in Canada, and so should be the concept of aborting female fetuses. It should make us feel the same revulsion we have for the Taliban murdering girls or enslaving them behind shrouds. Gendercide could very well be the 2010′s version of the outcry of gender apartheid a decade ago in Afghanistan and other parts of the world that do not accept the concept of egalitarianism.
But what I cannot accept is a notion that all Canadians should be treated with the same sort of inherent mistrust when it comes to ultrasounds. We’ve already been through this with terrorism. Where one specific demographic has had a prolific history of terrorism, we have taken to suspecting the 99.99 per cent of Canadians who are not terrorists. The lengths to which we have been inconvenienced in order to provide a preposterous appearance of not racially profiling has resulted in the most inefficient, intrusive and invasive way of travelling possible.
Similarly, a large percentage of Canadians have no chance of being sex-selective abortionists. However, it’s fair to say that this percentage changes on a daily basis as thousands of new Asian immigrants come to North America every single day, some of them harbouring backwards cultural hangups that are incompatible with our own culture. It is within the identified demographics from the article of people from India, China, Korea, Vietnam and the Philippines that we should be looking to target this problem.
There’s nothing racist or discriminatory about this. There is no rational reason for refusing to tell Canadians who are not of Asian descent the sex of the fetus since it’s reasonable to expect the fetus isn’t in danger. A blanket ban on all Canadian women is the same useless and failed approach used against terrorism, and all it’s going to do is piss everybody off.
There may be another way. Perhaps when a parent is apprised of the sex of a fetus, that doctor is legally obliged to inform abortion clinics of the decision with the name of the mother. Or perhaps a mother could sign a legal document swearing they will not abort the child after learning the sex. Although based on Canada’s nebulous abortion laws, or lack thereof, I could foresee the clinic going ahead with the abortion anyway. After all, these places are designed to put the woman’s choice ahead of all other issues, even if that choice is culturally reinforced by a patriarchal society that dominates and subjugates women.
Regardless of how it’s achieved, the idea that “policy would require the understanding and willingness of women of all ethnicities” is insulting to the vast majority of ethnicities that don’t practice this barbarism. In the same way that the politically correct are careful not to offend anybody by painting too broadly with the same broad brush, it’s extremely offensive to be equally suspected of wanting to abort your child for cultural issues that aren’t your own.
Ironically, although this issue is less about abortion itself and more about cultural gendercide, social conservatives might find themselves tempted to support a politically correct blanket ban until seven months, knowing that the greater goal of preventing as many abortions as possible is more important than the inconvenience it might serve to non-Asians.
But that sort of thinking has to be rejected. No matter where you stand on the abortion issue, the more morally repugnant act is surely the selection of an entire gender for eradication. This is a disgusting, offensive extermination of girls in the womb based on the belief that boys are more valuable in a society than girls. It must be stopped, and that cannot happen by simply closing our eyes and treating the problem as a generic one like the common cold.
I oppose this ban. It violates parental rights. You have the right to know who your child is. The onus should be on abortionists and one the women not to engage in this those kinds of abortions.
Are the F-35s capable of detecting gender before they abort a child?
I guess it does not matter because they are foreign brown babies that hate us because of our freedoms right cons?
I have no idea what you’re talking about. Honestly.
So abortion is fine just so long as we get rid of as many male babies as female ones?
“The concept of murdering women is morally repugnant in Canada, and so should be the concept of aborting female fetuses.” Is not the murdering of men and aborting male fetuses equally repugnant?
Is the answer to this “gender apartheid” a government program which is not insulting “to the “vast majorities of ethnicities that don’t practice this barbarism”?
The mind boggles.
Lorne,
I don’t know about any government programs. I do know that the abortion debate is never likely to be solved. One thing that’s certain is that any rational thinking person should agree that this particular aspect of abortion is most detestable. So, even if you’re against abortion in totality you should be able to get behind this. Dredging up the abortion debate will only cloud the real issue here.
“The concept of murdering women is morally repugnant in Canada, and so should be the concept of aborting female fetuses.”
The concept of murdering a human is morally repugnant in Canada, and so should be the concept of aborting a fetus.
If it’s wrong to abort a female, it’s wrong to abort. Either a woman has the right to choose, or she doesn’t. Either it is an unborn human, or it isn’t.
just how the h-ll do you get a woman to abort a baby girl. i said more in a post earlier and it is just plain nuts what is being done here and around the world.
Brrr,
This isn’t about the abortion debate, which will never work since it’s a 50-50 split. This is about targeting one sex for extermination.
Yes Adrian it is about the abortion debate. One cannot argue on one hand that the unborn child is not a human being and that the woman has the right to have the child killed and removed on demand at any time and for any reason with the state paying for it, to now claim that the sex of this “non human growth” matters. That is twisted logic and reasoning at the best. In any case the horse is long out of the barn, since there are plenty of private facilities along with making a quick trip to the US to find out the sex of the child, which makes any Canadian ban useless.
Alain,
The point is that the abortion debate will never, ever be solved. This issue can be.
Adrian, I still disagree provided that you do not mean that solving it one extreme or the other. One extreme being making all abortions a criminal offence and the other extreme being the status quo of totally unrestricted abortion on demande at tax payers expense. There is plenty of middle ground which is why it is indeed necessary to have the debate.
This issue most certainly can be the solution to the abortion debate: aborting girls is reprehensible, and the only reason that it is reprehensible is because these are real human beings being eradicated. Therefor abortion is reprehensible regardless of gender, so we ban it outright. Problem solved.
But what’s the middle ground of this debate? Women aren’t going to accept restrictions on the choice of abortion. The issue isn’t one of abortion. The people WANT children. They just don’t want those inferior species, girls.
Brrr,
The problem is not solved by an abortion ban, which is impossible since men and women everywhere would either ignore the ban or outright revolt against the ban. It didn’t work in Romania and it doesn’t work anywhere in the world it’s practiced. Abortion is a reality we have to face so long as reproduction is a choice made after conception.
I suggest that it is only a minority of old radical feminists who will continue to reject any restrictions on abortions. I have a couple of young adult and working daughters and know that they and their friends reject the radical feminist agenda. It is the old radical feminists who are out of date today. Furthermore, I suggest that the majority of Canadians reject state funded abortions, since it is not about health care but elective surgery. Like I said there needs to be a national debate and even a referendum on the matter.
Abortion as it exists now in Canada is no more a sacred cow than health care and both need to be open to debate. I would also add immigration and refugees.
Alain,
I agree with the personal choice of abortion. I disagree with abortion as a cosmetic preference.
Since Canada does not have a one child policy, I wonder if the problem is as large as made out to be. We can’t control what happens in china but i’m not convinced it is a major issue here. Seems the activism started because Harper is courting China again and the Human rights activists wanted this on the agenda.
Gutsy article Adrian as this subject always gets some people frothing at the mouth.
Thanks Peter. I found that it only really elicited fundamentalist pro-lifer opinions here and on Twitter. And frankly I don’t think that’s helpful because abortion will never, ever become illegal in Canada.
Gendercide, a term created by Mary Anne Warren in her 1985 book , “Gendercide: The Implications of Sex Selection”
The term means gender selective MASS killing. What in what humane sense is this morally acceptable?
Unfortunately, I cannot be a proud Canadian when fellow LEGAL citizens bring their upside down traditions to Canada. Not only do we distort a sense of identity, we lose the precious gift of life in its earliest stages by the thousands.
Beginning of December, a program aired on ABC 20/20 about India’s deadly secret. It was about 40 million girls who have vanished. All aborted before they could take their first breath. Their crime was that they were girls. As you know the gender ratios is India are terribly skewed about 914 girls per 1,000 boys. In Punjab it is about 833 girls per1,000 boys. Unfortunately this happens amongst the privileged and the educated also. The only woman who has brought cases against her in-laws and husband is Dr Mitu Khurana. Please watch her story and sign her petition for justice. Please give those 40 million girls silenced forever, a voice. Please forward this to as many friends as possible.
http://www.ipetitions.com/ petition/a-mothers-fight-to-save-her-daughters/
http://gendercide.epetitions . net/
After you sign the petition, there will be a request from the site for a donation. This donation is totally discretionary and does not in any way or form affect or benefit Dr Mitu Khurana. All she is asking for is your support (signing this petition) so that pressure can be put on the Indian authorities that the whole world is watching them in total disbelief as they make a young mother run around in vain for four years in search of justice
Adrian I’m not militantly anti-abortion or ” unconditionally ” pro-choice without some reasonable limits like making late term abortions illegal.
I have no solution that would make everybody happy, and abortion will always be morally suspect, no matter what the arguments for it are and fought over and over again without the possibility of some universal consensus on what is ” The right thing to do ” in any or every case.
That said, I think that the ” militant” feminist position of of denying the ” Humanity ” of the fetus is intellectually dishonest and is just a way to ” literally ” de-humanize the fetus to make it easier to dispose/kill it !
What would be honest, if somewhat cold, would be for the pro choice people to admit to the Humanity, or potential Humanity of the fetus but honestly state that they consider that the choice of the woman is a higher right, to them, than the rights of the fetus: Instead we get all the hypocrisy and inconsistency of saying that a fetus 5 minutes before birth isn’t human, but 5 minutes after birth killing it would be first degree murder !
I could better respect ” I don’t care about the fetus ” rather than their trying to define the fetus as being like some sort of tumour one can elect to have removed !
Jean,
I like the word you used when you said “potential”. That’s what a four-week old fetus represents. The potential for human life. It’s not a fully realized human being yet, but it does possess the potential, based on some nurture and some nature, to survive. The reason I feel abortion is less immoral at this stage is that the potentiality is weaker the younger the fetus is. But the more it develops, the more I have a problem with the idea.
At some point, in my mind there is a line where the fetus becomes an individual with a likelihood of surviving without the mother. It could be between five months or older, but it’s very unethical to think about terminating the life of the fetus at that point. For what is the inherent difference between an 8-month old fetus and a newborn child?
But again, this isn’t really about abortion. If you read online you’ll see that girls are being murdered, post-partum, and their bodies disposed of in secret. Not in Canada, perhaps, but it does happen elsewhere. And this is what I find despicable.
I agree that it’s not really about abortion, but since people couldn’t seem to avoid changing the subject I wanted to add my thoughts to ” THAT ” debate.
What ” THIS ” is, is deciding that one values having a boy more than a girl and basing one’s decision to abort in this alone and something prevalent in some cultures that the ” politically correct ” are forbidden to mention or consider and that any disapproval of means putting in question the morality of abortion or the idea of putting any reasonable limits on when or rather how late one can decide to abort.
So, are we stopping life with a condom, with the pill as the old Catholic idea would state and not letting random chance decide on pregnancy or not ? A day after pill is also mostly stopping a potential birth but long before the ” human being ” is an actuality.
But a 7 month fetus is viable outside the body of the mother and is very very close to the 9 month fetus that 5 minutes later will be a human with full legal rights at birth.