Female FeticideFollow

I would argue that the result of a sonogram should not be withheld from parents, pretty much ever. The only exception I can think of is if one parent is mentally unstable - which is what? no more than 80% of the population, right?

Well, the point was that they were getting overcrowded, so they wanted to lower the population. Having only one child per two people means you're lowering your population, whereas having two kids per two people keeps the population exactly where it's at, assuming every couple has two kids.

I do know what you mean. I feel like I'm still on firm ground, but I can see the marsh from there. Like, if people started screening for cosmetic reasons my reaction would be purely judgmental: Do you ******** want a kid, or not? If not, then stop putting yourselves through this. Jerks.

It gets another thing to blame you for.

From what I remember, the "one child" policy only applied to people in cities and towns. People in rural farming communities were permitted two children.

I'm sure they still made sure at least one of them was a boy. If the second one was a girl, okay. If the second one was also a boy, even better.

The problem had nothing to do with family names and everything to do with traditions. In China, the son stays with the parents, inherits the house, brings a wife into the family to have kids, etc, but the daughter almost always moves in with her husband's family. Thus, if you had a daughter, she would leave you and you would have no one to take care of you in your old age and would not see your grandchildren grow up.

A girl in my high school was from China. Her family had to move to the US when her mother became pregnant with a son... Both her parents were upper class medical doctors so they were able to pick up and move pretty easily. I remember her griping all the time about how her parents disparaged her and loved on her little brother. Last I heard, she was in medical school learning to be a surgeon to pay for her Prada handbag addiction, and her slacker little brother was a townie up here in Athens who dropped out of college to join a band.

I wonder who they are going to move in with when they retire now?

Edited, Jan 19th 2012 12:01pm by catwho

There's another side of that coin. My Taiwanese friend's parents granted his sister much more freedom, and generally treated her gentler. She was able to pursue more personal interests (like a veterinary career), go pretty far away to college, and is generally slightly more coddled (though she's still insanely bright). My friend, as the son, had both of them looking over his shoulder on everything, and much more responsibilities from a very young age. He was pretty much forced into staying close to home, pursuing dentistry, and taking over the family business. He felt a tremendous pressure to get married and start a family before his mother passed on, though he wasn't able to do so.

It's tough for me to relate, often. I used to ask him what he actually wanted to do with his life, and he could never provide a real answer. There's a sort of deeply ingrained resignation in him, which is kind of depressing.

Edited, Jan 19th 2012 12:37pm by Eske

I had friends, two sisters and a brother, whose parent immigrated from Sri Lanka. Their parents treated them pretty much equitably, but their grandparents and aunts often made them feel awful. While they grew up their grandparents and aunts openly favoured the son over the daughters in hundreds of ways. And openly favoured one of the daughters in a different set of hundreds of ways because she had lighter skin than her sister and brother. Blatant things like giving one child chocolate and biscuits and none to the other two. Praise to one child and insults to the others without any other reason than their sex or the colour of their skin. Ordering the girls to serve and obey their brother, and fulfill all his requests, and making sure that the brother asked them for stuff and that they did those things. soiling the fair skinned daughter and neglecting the dark skinned daughter.

Before I heard about this childhood treatment, which they all still obviously resented and felt hurt about, I hadn't even noticed a difference in their skin tones. To his credit the now young man turned out not only a polite guy socially, but perfectly pleasant and democratic with his sisters and their active friend.

I don't remember Samira ever saying where she wanted to ban it. You really don't see where it's easy to be uncomfortable about the ethical implications of an action, but still not actually want to make it illegal?

I was replying to Smash. I was also making a broader comment about the unintended consequences of manipulating concepts in order to achieve an end. You end out having those manipulated definitions being used for things you didn't intend and then you have to act to prevent them. It's what leads to a decision to prevent women from making a choice about abortion even though those doing it presumably support the "right" to make that choice in the first place.


To me, that's the expected result when you are defining rights not based on some principle, but because it's convenient for a socio-political objective to define them that way. Again, if you really believe that a woman has a right to choose to abort, you should support that right no matter why she makes the choice. If she wants to have a boy child and thus decides to abort a girl, why is that any less valid than doing it because she doesn't want a child at all, or it would be a burden, or any other reason she might have? She's either free to make that choice, or she isn't.

To me, this is on par with forcing women to look at ultrasounds before she can elect to get an abortion.

Abortion is legal. The reasons shouldn't really be anyone's business but the two people involved in making the decision.

Edited, Jan 19th 2012 1:57pm by Belkira

Yes. But the principle (yeah, I'm using that word again, so buckle your seatbelt!) behind such restrictions is the concept of competing rights. It's not really about "public good", but rather "harm to others". My right to not be trampled to death by a false claim that the building is on fire outweighs your right to freely speak a lie about the existence of said fire. We can (or should) be able to trace any infringement of rights to this concept. The second more than one person exists in a society, there will be infringement of rights. But we should make that choice based on which right is more important to protect. That's clear in the case of someone falsely calling "fire" in a crowded theater. Of course, some cases are not so clear.

In the case of the pro-choice position, the argument is that the woman's right to control her own body outweighs the right of the growing fetus to be born and live. Or alternatively, is based on the argument that the growing fetus has no rights and thus the woman's right to control her body is absolute. There is no "social good" argument (or there shouldn't be). In the US at least, Roe v Wade does allow for growing rights for the fetus (else they'd not have placed any restrictions on abortion at all). But the issue is and always should be defined within that "competing rights" concept.


The restriction in this case isn't about competing rights. If the woman's right to choose to abort outweighs the right (if any exist) of the fetus to be born, then that can't change based on the sex of the fetus. She either has that right, or she doesn't.


I guess the point I'm trying to make here is that the act of attempting to prevent a woman from knowing the sex of a fetus so as to prevent abortions based on that criteria is in violation of the claimed right to choose to abort that has been championed by left leaning political activists for decades. My question is whether that fight (at least for some) was ever really about the "right" at all, but rather to attempt to achieve a social objective (mainly getting poor single women to abort their children). This ties into my oft-stated observation that when government takes responsibility for something (by paying for it), it will eventually act to limit people's actions with regard to that thing. So if the government is creating a social safety net, it encounters the need to reduce costs/burdens on that system. If too many poor single women are having children they can't afford, then fighting for their "right" to abort makes a hell of a lot of sense, doesn't it?

But if by aborting more girl fetuses than boys, it creates some imbalance of sexes down the line, that *also* presents a challenge to a planned/controlled society. So the "right" should disappear in that case.

If you support the right to make that choice, then you must give the women the freedom to make it as they wish. Else, it's not really a right. It's just an action that is treated as a right when it aligns with a social agenda, but ceases to be one when it doesn't. Which means, it's not a right. It's population control.


Yeah. I realize that this is an uncomfortable line of thought for many. And I'm sure I'll get tons of rate downs for saying it. But call my a cynic, but I think about these sorts of things. I question why governments take the actions they take. I question why movements do so. I always attempt to understand what drives those things. I've long believed that many of the rights fought for by liberal activists aren't really about rights, but about a desire to use the idea of rights to generate desired social outcomes. And this case seems to bear it out here.


That's not to say that everyone who is pro choice falls into that category. It means that if you are pro choice, then you should be for the right reasons, and not just because you're following an organization, or a cause, or whatever. That leads you to not realize when those rights stop being rights and become about control.



/shrug

I think if we start out understanding the "why" of something, then it's easier to determine when we're violating our principles. The danger comes when we don't understand the principles at all. Then it's easy to manipulate the outcomes. Just label something a particular way and people will follow.

I wasn't trying to imply that the right to obtain an abortion (if we assume one exists) and the right to freedom of speech were similar in that both are (or should be) limited in situations involving competing personal rights. Rather, I was trying to point out that not all rights (actual rights, not just "desirable social outcomes") are absolute in all situations. Regardless of the right, there are probably always at least some cases in which that right should not be upheld.