Sex-selective AbortionFollow

I'm against it because less women means less sandwiches.

Abort the boys to leave more sammiches for you.

It only really became an issue in Asia, specifically China, due to the One Child policy. In China, the male stays at home with the parents and is obligated to take care of them when they become elderly whether he marries or not. A girl who marries moves in with the husband's family. So the fear was that if your first child was a girl and you could only have one kid, you would not have a boy to take care of you when you grew up, or if your daughter unmarried to stay with you, you would not get grandchildren. Hence, boys are greatly favored.

None of those issues really seem to affect the US. We do not have cultural norms for elderly parents staying with one gender of child over the other, nor are we limited to one child without paying a hefty fine. Every pregnant woman I've known in the US has been totally cool with the sex of her child once it was confirmed.

Actually, it's a worthless bill designed to give the congressional GOP something to talk about when they run negative commercials about their opponents in November.

Luckily, I took care to ask specifically about the theory and not about this actual bill.

In theory, I'm against it.

In practice, I don't see any way to monitor or limit it aside from universally restricting access. Which I'm also against.

Speaking of, saying you're "against" it seems sort of silly. I doubt many people are "for" selective-sex abortions, just as most people aren't "for" abortions in general. "You had that baby aborted? Fuck yeah, you go girl!". Rather you're in favor of allowing people the freedom to make this personal decision for themselves.

You know, I see articles like that, and I think, "well, if it's so ******* expensive, don't take the ******* risk then! Are there no forms of birth control there?".

Trans-vaginal ultrasounds for everyone!

It wasn't that long ago when a normal old pregnancy didn't require an ultrasound at all.

From what I understand about ultrasounds and gender; if the ultrasound shows a ***** the fetus is clearly male, but the lack of a visible ***** doesn't mean it's not male. The weeny might be hiding, or too little or yet undeveloped.

Girl-aborting could be risky business.

No ones business but the woman.

My understanding it that's what has brought this issue to the forefront. While the whole issue is soaked in politics, the part to take away from the recent Planned Parenthood videos is that if someone walks into one of their facilities seeking an abortion, and then asks to delay the abortion until she can get an ultrasound in order to determine the gender before making her decision, PP will happily oblige them. Now obviously the videos are taken by people playing a part, so we can't say for sure how often this actually happens, but the seeming lack of any sort of "Gee. I'm not sure that's right" on the part of the PP employees is a bit troublesome.

Having said that, I'm also a bit unclear how this sort of law would change anything. Obviously, the woman can simply lie about why she's waiting, or why she wants an ultrasound or whatever other tests, and nothing can be done about it. I think the point (of the legislation) is to ensure that this isn't just being done openly and thus becoming a culturally accepted thing.



Yup. But in a generation or two, if there is no attempt to say clearly that this isn't acceptable to us, isn't it likely that it will become acceptable? Today pretty much everyone has a negative reaction to the idea of choosing to abort based on the sex of the fetus. But if we don't put something down on paper saying that this isn't acceptable, can you say that our grandchildren wont think it's just fine?

I'd also say that if a mother even considered an abortion because it was the wrong sex, she probably didn't really want to be pregnant anyway and was looking for an excuse. Generally, if an American couple is actively trying to conceive, they are thrilled to have either one.

Sir, I grant you my proxy.