Sex-selective AbortionFollow

Not happy to get stuffed in only one chamber of Congress, the GOP is introducing a bill to ban sex-selective abortions in the Senate.

I'm well aware that there are several parts of the bill that are dumb, and truly aimed at reducing access to all abortions in practice (doctors legally required to report potential cases of sex-selective abortion to police, etc.), which gives Democrats enough practical reason to oppose the bill. However, I'm curious how you ultra-liberal hippies feel about the issue of sex-selective abortion in theory.

If we take for granted that women have the right to terminate a fetus, does it really matter what their motives are? For the sake of limiting our scope, let's ignore other dubious motives like abortions in the case of mental defect.

I think 'it matters' that a woman or a couple would choose to abort based on the sex of the child because it could be an indication of a society that still favors one sex over another. I don't think it's a legal matter for the courts though. It's personal.

It seems like one of those things that could be difficult to prove.

I'm generally against it, but wasn't aware that it was a problem in this country. Is it? I mean it's something you hear about in Asia or something. Is this akin to banning Sharia Law in Kansas or wherever they did it? I dunno, I don't really have a horse in this race. It's at least something that's morally questionable in my mind, and if we really decide we want to ban it I wouldn't oppose.

Overall, looks like a preemptive bill to solve a problem that doesn't exist.

Shew!

Second thought on this - if the baby is unwanted, it's unwanted. Who are we to judge why?

I'm against it because everything I can find on the topic says that you can't normally know the gender until around 18-20 weeks, I'm against abortion after the end of the third month(first trimester, w/e).

Anyone who would decide to terminate the pregnancy because the gender isn't what they hoped for is @#%^ed in the head anyway, and shouldn't be allowed to procreate.

Well okay. How about the idea of abortion based solely on the idea of gender makes me more uncomfortable than other reasons, but I'm not sure it makes me uncomfortable enough to step in and say you're bad for wanting to do it. I mean if you're afraid your husband may turn into this guy or something do I still blame you?

I dunno.

I suppose you could outlaw divulging the sex of the fetus to combat sex-selective abortions.

I was speaking generally on the whole "pro/con" divide.

That's pretty much what I think too.

These specific types of abortions are an issue in India too apparently, it's just not quite as big of an issue as in China.

And yeah, anyone who thinks that pro-choice people love abortions and want everyone to have one, are seriously deluded.

Eh, like Elinda said, an unwanted child is an unwanted child. It's alright for a woman to abort because she didn't want ANY kid, but not because she didn't want a boy? Seems kind of hypocritical. There are chances that unwanted children can be abused, neglected, etc. And that chance exists also if a woman (or even a man) has a child that's not the sex they had hoped for. We might not want to think about this, but it's out there and it happens.

It's not the job or the responsibility of the PP employee to make morality judgments for their patients. It's their job to dispense healthcare. If people want morality judgments, they can go to the pregnancy clinics that tell them how evil abortion is.

Something else bringing the issue to the forefront, thought I had read about this at some point recently. Memory may be fuzzy, but every now and then it comes through.

Linky



Its apparently 95-99% accurate or something.




Edited, Jun 14th 2012 11:30am by someproteinguy

We can DO that?

No. I disagree with that, though that is sort of a different conversation, I'll make a quick reply. I'll put it this way, I'm pro-choice, however, if my partner got pregnant, it's completely my business. I should have a say, or at least be able to weigh in with my opinion about it. It is mine too after all. That being said, I ended up in that situation with my ex last year, we agreed upon the fact that neither of us was even remotely ready, and if the test came back positive, we'd opt to abort. It came back negative, so we never had to go through with it. The point though, is that we weren't going to do anything unless we could both agree upon the course of action. That's how it should be.

Anyway, like I said, that's a different topic. This is more about the moral issue behind choosing to abort because it's not the gender you wanted,and frankly, that's an absolutely terrible reason to do it.

You're adorable for believing that.


Well, God forbid our grandchildren be allowed to govern themselves and make their own decisions about what's right and wrong.

More reprehensible than dealing drugs, or under aged drinking?



Of course you can. We have laws which make it illegal for someone to sell alcohol to a minor, or to someone they suspect will provide said alcohol to a minor. Similarly, landlords can be held responsible for drug dealing/distributing/etc on their property by tenants if they knew it was happening and did not prevent it. Those laws also require someone to know what someone else is going to do, yet we managed to pass and apply them just fine.


Do these laws catch many people? Nope. But it does prevent things we find reprehensible (or even just a little bit wrong) from becoming casually accepted. The guy buying beer for the kids around the corner knows he can't tell the clerk that's what he's doing. This reinforces that what he's doing is frowned upon by society. And the tenant can't tell his landlord he's cooking meth on his property (and the landlord can't then repeat that to someone else). Again, it reinforces social perceptions.

Similarly, even if the only effect a law like this is to make the person seeking the abortion for gender reasons knowingly have to conceal that fact, it does reinforce on that person that what they're doing is not acceptable by society. And occasionally, someone will just walk up and say "I don't want a girl, so I want to abort if it's a girl". If we all agree that's reprehensible, then should we not do anything about this in cases where the person admits openly that this is what they're doing?

1. I, too, am more concerned about what the practice of gender-selective abortion says about a society than I am about the practice in its particulars.

2. Further, I can see problems down the line resulting from the practice. Doesn't take a crystal ball; those problems are already happening in China and elsewhere.

3. However, I would not vote to restrict the right of any individual to choose to bear and raise a child, whatever the reason. Trusting people to make their own decisions is the very basis of liberty, and refusing to interfere based on my own sensibilities is the very opposite of the dreaded "nanny state".

4. Planned Parenthood leaving an individual's options open within the law is perfectly acceptable to me.

I'm in favor of abortion for any reason for the duration of gestation.

No. Which is exactly my point.

If you walk up to a store clerk with a case of beer and tell the clerk "Some kids in the parking lot asked me to buy this for them", and the clerk sells the beer to you anyway, said clerk is subject to legal action.

If you walk up to an abortion doctor and tell him "I want to get an abortion if my fetus is a girl", and the doctor performs the abortion for you anyway, he is subject to no legal action at all.


If one really is more reprehensible than the other, then why is it ok to place such a burden on the involved professional in one case, but not in the other? Remember, I'm responding to the argument that we shouldn't do this because it's somehow impractical to implement or we can't determine what the doctor knows about the motives for the abortion. I think that's a BS response though. We do this in many other cases.

Is anyone seriously arguing that a store clerk should be more capable of determining the motivation of someone buying beer than a doctor determining the motivation of a woman seeking an abortion? Cause that's pretty darn silly.



I'm using cases that are more or less identical to the proposed laws. If a doctor knowingly performs an abortion in which the gender was a determining factor, then he can be held legally responsible. How is that any different than a store clerk who knows someone's going to provide the beer he sells to a minor? Or a landlord who knowingly continues to rent his property to someone distributing drugs? Or a gun store clerk knowingly selling a gun to someone planning to kill someone else.

We can toss our hands up and say "They can't possibly know what someone else is going to do or why", but that's not the point. If they can't know, then the law doesn't affect them. It's designed to make it so that if someone walks into a liquor store and says "sell me some beer so I can provide it for those kids", or walks into a gun store and says "sell me a gun so I can kill my boss", or walks into an clinic and says "give me an abortion because I don't want a girl", the law will compel the person providing the good or service to refuse it.


We do this in other cases, so the argument that it's somehow impossible to do it here is just plain false.

Edited, Jun 14th 2012 6:51pm by gbaji

The chance of you having grandchildren is low enough that you don't need to worry your head about it.

I don't know. Aside from what has already been said about what this says about society and gender roles etc etc, I'm ok with this. I don't find it "reprehensible" that a woman use gender when deciding whether or not to abort. It just doesn't seem like that big a deal to me... Does that make me a bad person?

That isn't what makes you a bad person.

We could both get pregnant then have abortions together while saying our vows. It'll be epic.

ITT: Jophiel never attends another meeting.