The House is set to vote Thursday on a controversial bill that aims to ban sex-selective abortions by fining or imprisoning doctors who perform them.
As pretty much the entirety of the issue the situation is fucked up.
How would you enforce it, while keeping the doctor-patient confidentiality framework in place, for example.
How does it play out in terms of choice philosophy - presumably if the fetus is not considered alive/sentient/whatever to begin with, than the question of discrimination doesn't even apply. So why would it be illegal to abort the one gender but not the other?
On the other hand - gender eugenics. Icky.
I don't pay too much attention to the intricacies of choice/life debate, but I don't think this aspect has been a big part of the conversation until now. This bill is not going to pass, it looks like, but somehow I suspect it is the first shot in a whole new conversation.
Plus what are the long-term implications. I tend toward the idea that there can be either the biological or environmental origins for one's sexuality. If that turns out to be true, this is going to set precedents for (some) parents picking/choosing whether or not to have kids based on predicted sexuality.
IIRC, there are already this type of debates going on vis-a-vis the Deaf Culture thesis: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deaf_cultu
And this is all going to seem like simple and straightforward good old days when genetic engineering begins to enter the common place.
Wanna build a 'perfect kid'?
Weird times.
2012-05-31 12:55 am (UTC)
(These tourists are not going to back-alley clinics in South Central LA or Planned Parenthoods; they're going to fancy clinics who accept a lot of money to do what is currently legal but unethical in the extreme.)
2012-05-31 02:09 am (UTC)
2012-05-31 02:27 am (UTC)
2012-05-31 02:32 am (UTC)
The most theoretically useful (and practically least likely to be adopted) suggestion I've heard yet has been to stop informing parents of baby's gender a all, before birth.
2012-05-31 02:46 am (UTC)
Look, aside from the fact there should be NO limits on a woman's right to choose, full stop, how do they plan on determining the 'truth' as to WHY said woman is in there in the first place? If I wanted an abortion I would lie to anyone about anything I had to in order to get one. Because it's my damn body and fuck you that's why.
These kinds of laws are useless. Like the "no late term abortions!" crap, they serve the sole purpose of making politicians feel good/look good, while accomplishing nothing. If you're anti-choice, you haven't gained anything because the scope of impact is ridiculously minimal, and if you're pro-choice all you've gained is some pissed off women because you've limited that scope at all.
2012-05-31 05:33 pm (UTC)
J
2012-06-01 10:35 am (UTC)
2012-05-31 05:35 pm (UTC)
Creepy.
J
2012-05-31 05:46 pm (UTC)
Infanticide of girls is fairly common practice in pre-modern societies (seen as economic burden and a null value in maintaining familial line), and it's been sped up by the one-child policy in China.
As a result there's a demographic gap, with a lot more males than females. It's been going on long enough that the first age cohort of these guys is now looking for brides and can't find enough. Short-term repercussions are pretty ugly - kidnappings/forced marriages/sex slavery of women from neighboring countries, social instability - young single guys with no romantic attachments are not exactly the recipe for equanimity.
Long-term, hopefully, it will redefine the 'value' of daughters and maybe stem the practice. But that's iffy - traditions like that tend to be very tenacious.
2012-06-01 10:21 am (UTC)
Admittedly it was in NZ, and there is some cultural bias.
It's not entirely straight forward.