Analysis

Why pro-choice = pro-gendercide

It’s a familiar refrain: oppose abortion, and you’re anti-woman. Oppose government-mandated contraception coverage, and you’re anti-woman. Acknowledge the concept of sexual responsibility, and you’re anti-woman. But what if you’re trying to prevent abortion from being used to target baby girls for destruction?

Well, it turns out that’s anti-woman, too. LifeNews reports that several congressional Democrats have taken the incredible position that respect for women requires tolerating prenatal gendercide:

During today’s debate on the Congressional bill to ban sex-selection abortions, Michigan Democrat John Conyers said the ban on sex-selection abortions “tramples the rights of women.”

“It limits a woman’s right to choose and jeopardizes her access to safe, legal medical care,” he claimed.

Conyers, ranking member on the House Judiciary Committee, went as far as fighting GOP attempts to name the bill after Susan B. Anthony to honor women.

Jarrold Nadler, of New York, said the ban on sex-selection abortions is the “latest tactic in the War on Women.” Rep. Hank Johnson said the bill was part of the “Republican War on Women.” And Barbara Lee of California went as far as claiming that women would reset to back alley abortions if they couldn’t obtain a sex-selection abortion like the ones the bill would ban.

Photo credit: World Can't Wait on Flickr

The White House has announced that President Barack Obama also opposes the bill.

On one level, this should be the final nail in the coffin for the idea that legal abortion was ever a pro-woman position. If terms like gender equality, feminism, and women’s rights don’t at the very least mean that you have the right not to be killed simply for being female, then they mean absolutely nothing. There can be no more egregious form of gender discrimination than killing a helpless, defenseless child who has committed no crime other than possessing the wrong chromosomes.

Having to buy your own birth control, thinking hard about parenthood before having sex, not being able to have your daughter killed…these don’t even begin to compare. This is the perversity of what modern liberalism has done to feminism: completely exchanging real goods like equal rights and dignity for phony “rights” that are superficial at best and destructive at worst – and not just to babies, but to mothers as well.

On another level, however, there is a necessary consistency to the Democrats’ position. If unborn babies aren’t people, if they’re really just subhuman body parts over which women have absolute dominion, then how can any reason for disposing of them be less tolerable than any other? Indeed, how can the ardent pro-abort afford to support gender-discrimination protection for fetuses when the mere admission that fetuses can be identified as male or female punctures the fantasy that they aren’t human?

Never has the emptiness of the “War on Women” theme been clearer. Pro-choicers exploit both sexism and fear of sexism for political gain, but their ideological commitment to abortion means they simply can’t be there for women’s actual rights when they’re needed most.

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  • Oedipa

    You’d have a point, Calvin, if sex selective abortion was actually a problem in this country. But it’s just not. You want to pass this legislation in India? Have at it. But in the U.S. for every 1,000 girls born there are 1,048 boys born. That small deviation is dropping, and everyone acknowledges it’s probably due to Asian Americans communities in this country. It’s just not an issue for communities that are “westernized”. Take South Korea. As an Asian culture, they’ve had a history of sex selective abortion. But since climbing into the ranks of the most advance countries, with a dynamic economy that values women in the workplace and the culture, their sex selective abortions have shrunk to near western levels.

    That’s the roundabout way to say: the best way to reduce sex selection is to embrace the value of women in the culture. And the non-stop crusade to roll back reproductive rights is not the way to do that. No matter what patina of self-righteousness you can put on this new salvo, it’s got to lumped in with all the other revanchist laws that have been proposed on the topic.

    • Dolce

       So basically, it doesn’t matter if a few girls or boys have to die because of their sex, as long as this doesn’t happen too often, we shouldn’t care about it.

      So I guess you’re all for having no laws against honour killings, since it is rare for this sort of thing to happen in North America?

      • Oedipa

        Where did I say it doesn’t matter? What I said was, if you want to work against sex selective abortion, work at the underlying reasons girls and women might be undervalued culturally and economically. Turning doctors into “motivation police” won’t come anywhere near doing that.

        • Dolce

           We can apply this reasoning to many other things.

          Lets not have laws against honour killings, and simply work on the underlying reasons that cause husbands to kill their wives, or fathers to kill their daughters.

          Lets not have laws against lynching and simply work on the underlying reasons that cause racism.

          Lets not have laws against spousal abuse and simply work on the underlying reasons that cause people to abuse those they swore to love best.

          Does this sound ridiculous to you? It should.

          I’m not saying DON’T work on the underlying reasons – prolifers are doing that everywhere. Look at groups like “All Girls Allowed”, or the documentary “It’s a Girl!”, or organizations like “Feminists for Life”. I’m saying that if something is discriminatory towards women OR men based solely on their sex, then the law should have something to say about that, especially if those women’s and men’s lives are on the line. Or is it impossible to make something both illegal and to work towards mitigating the underlying causes for its occurrence? (Hint: it is perfectly reasonable to do both because both approaches are INCREDIBLY necessary when trying to enact change).

          • Antigone

            Ah, but the main difference between abortion and the examples above is that those are crimes against actual existing people. As Oedipa stated above, this bill was only a stepping stone so that legislators could continue to chip away at the reproductive rights of  existing women. 

          • Solntsye

            Unborn women absolutely exist. They are living and existing within their mother. If fertilization has taken place, a human being exists.

          • 12angry_men

            The difference I see here, in my humble opinion, is that abortion is a legal procedure. I’m not arguing the morality of it, just that it is legal. So it is extremely hard to regulate parts of a legal procedure that don’t actually seem to be happening. And in the small cases where it might happen, all a woman has to do is say she’s aborting for a different reason.

          • liveaction

            Clearly, you’re unfortunately not up on your science. Unborn children are indeed existing people. It’s wrong to minimize (or actually, deny) their killings and claim you’re all for the reproductive rights of women since they’re the only ones who exist. They are one of two people who exist in the situation and both are important. Take a look here: http://www.dakotavoice.com/Docs/South%20Dakota%20Abortion%20Task%20Force%20Report.pdf

          • ModernThinker

            Hmmmm, I’m afraid the self-righteous justifications YOU’RE using simply are not going to resolve ANY issues, and are nothing more than blatherings from ANOTHER “holier than thou” type.

            The FACT of the matter there is NO way to enforce such a law. Why? Because, if such a law were passed, the woman wanting the abortion would simply not bother to tell the doctor, nurse, staff member, or whomever the REASON for the abortion. Undertand? Good.

            ALL of this blathering and rhetoric about “we’re saving babies”, blah, blah, blah, is utter baloney, pure and simple. What it actually IS, and ONLY is, is one person (or group) trying to CONTROL another person or group. You see your views as “righteous”, use ANY blathering and excuses you can find to “justify” your viewpoint, and believe YOU have the right to tell another person what they can or cannot do. And this includes the blatherings from Lila Rose, herself. And doing so is simply unconstitutional, WHATEVER the rhetoric and alleged “justification” involved. Period.

            Does Rose have any kids herself? If not, then she should work on perpetuating the gender in the most natural and effective way possible… having some baby girls.

    • Antigone

      Thank you! Those were exactly the points I was going to bring up, that it hardly ever happens here anyway, and that the real problem is the lack of respect for EXISTING women, including the right to control when or if they have children as well as how many they have. 

      And who’s to say that it only goes one way? I’d much rather have a daughter than a son, and I can’t be the only one who thinks that. I’m not necessarily saying that I’d abort a fetus because it was male, but if it were an option I would choose to have a girl.

      • MoonChild02

        It’s more common than you think. The Protect Our Girls page has references and links to studies that show the fact that, yes, there are sex-selection abortions going on in the US.
        http://protectourgirls.com/learn/

      • megrits

         The preborn are still EXISTING people. Ask any woman who is pg.   And too many have a lack of respect for them and that is a real problem.  Women already have the right to control when or if they have s-x,  when or if  to use birth control and when or if to keep the baby or give it to someone who wants it even more. 

      • liveaction

        This isn’t about women controlling when or if they get pregnant. That is each woman’s choice. It’s about the fact that no one -woman, man, or alien – should have the right to kill another innocent, existing, human being. And certainly not simply because they would have preferred another gender.

    • Calvin Freiburger

      Maybe gender discrimination is a miniscule reason for annual US abortions, maybe it isn’t. It’s safe to say some women who cite more PC justifications for researchers like Guttmacher actually had less sympathetic reasons for aborting, just as voters often tell pollsters one thing then privately vote differently. But let’s assume for a moment that it’s not a real problem yet. So what? The bill is just as valid as a preventive measure, and my underlying point — that feminism means absolutely nothing if it doesn’t mean you can’t be killed for being female — remains unchallenged.

      But I’m more interested in the unhinged sickness of your second paragraph, made all the more obscene by the sight of one of LA’s most pompous, arrogant commenters presuming to lecture someone else on self-righteousness. The suggestion that valuing women is in any way related to or dependent upon allowing abortion (no matter how insistent you are in masking it under asinine euphemisms like “reproductive rights”) is so nakedly demagogic as to be unworthy of any respect.

      • Oedipa

        I’m gonna ignore the ad hominem you continue to shovel my way, but I have to say this: I see the writers here are eager to denounce the Guttmacher study (I haven’t seen it; but if it’s a poll, then I’d agree it’s usefulness only goes so far), but are unwilling to discuss the government’s own numbers. The CDC & HHS study has a 1,052 boys to 1,000 girls gender ratio in 1983 and a 1,048 to 1,000 ratio in 2009.

        The numbers are steady and are slowly declining. That hardly makes for data that suggests an imminent or growing problem. While I know many pro-lifers are absolutists enough to argue it’s not good enough until the ratio is even, for sober observers of public policy it just doesn’t arise to the level where the legislators need to dramatically makeover the doctor-patient relationship (turning doctors into the “motivation police”).

        • http://twitter.com/CalFreiburger Calvin Freiburger

          Then your quarrel is with whoever’s denounced the study. As for me, I haven’t even referenced it, much less made any claim about the numbers. In fact, as my article illustrates, I’m less interested in the particular bill than I am by (a) the philosophy that says valuing women means everything under the sun EXCEPT for not killing them on the basis of their sex, and (b) the moral implications of the fact that fetuses have human characteristics like gender in the first place.

          Oh, and there you go again with the dubious premise that the abortionist-mother relationship is a legitimate doctor-patient relationship.

          • Oedipa

            “… the dubious premise that the abortionist-mother relationship is a legitimate doctor-patient relationship.”

            The entire medical infrastructure disagrees with you. And I don’t need to hear anecdotes about the doctors who have a conflict of conscience on the matter. Until the AMA, the insurance industry, the 50 departments of health across the United States, federal regulations like HIPPAA and CLIA, or even OSHA say otherwise, this position you take puts you squarely in the fringe.

            I realize it might create some uncomfortable cognitive dissonance to accept it as both a medical procedure and also as the evil massacre of babes. But at least then you wouldn’t be in the untenable position of arguing that every licensed, regulated abortion doctor is no better than the guy with the coat hanger in his hand.

            Of course, if you get your way, that’s exactly what every abortion doctor *will* be.

          • http://twitter.com/CalFreiburger Calvin Freiburger

            Now there’s a dead-giveaway to weak-mindedness: substituting rational thought for lazy appeals to authority. (And you pro-aborts aren’t even consistent on blind allegiance to authority, considering the overwhelming scientific consensus that unborn are live, human, and individual from fertilization onward.)

            Oh, and the AMA wasn’t always like that (http://www.abort73.com/blog/the_american_medical_association_addresses_abortion/). If anything, their reversal is probably an indicator that they’ve become politicized.

            Look, Oedipa: just because your ideology won’t allow you to be honest about embryology and the Hippocratic Oath doesn’t mean thoughtful, honest people have to play along.

            “every licensed, regulated abortion doctor is no better than the guy with the coat hanger in his hand.”

            That’s true. Ethically speaking, one is no better than the other.

          • Oedipa

            No, it’s not a “lazy” appeal to authority because the authorities are numerous, they constitute experts on the subject and a consensus exists among those experts.

            Your attempt to undermine that authority is not persuasive. The AMA screed you linked is 140 years old. That’s also, maybe not coincidentally, the same exact time many American medical schools abandoned the Hippocrates’ oath until it was updated by the World Medical Association — experts! — in 1948 for modern consciences.

            I might note that a little after Hippocrates crafted his oath there was another famous Athenian, a guy named Aristotle, who was writing that up until 40 days in the womb the fetus had something akin to a “vegetable soul”. Which is to say: if you’re going to appeal to authority, I’m comfortable appealing to the modern ethos; certainly not the Reconstruction era or Hellenic antiquity.

          • http://twitter.com/CalFreiburger Calvin Freiburger

            Of course it’s lazy. First, what makes HIPPAA, OSHA, or CLIA’s references meaningful or authoritative?

            Second, because there are babies that need killing, now insurance companies are suddenly considered a reliable arbiter of ethics and morality?

            Third, what arguments or evidence have the AMA or any state health department put forth that refutes the basic facts of embryology? What special insight do they have into morality, philosophy, or the concept of rights?

            Fourth, you’re still ignoring the glaring hypocrisy of appealing to authority in response to one question (which happens to be a moral/philosophical claim against which technical “expert” opinion is of little value anyway) while your rejects a REAL consensus about the biological status of the preborn (which is a scientific question where experts and authority matter far more).

            Oh, and you seem to be assuming which version of the Hippocratic Oath I’m citing, even thought the modern version is where I find the talk of “tread[ing] with care in matters of life and death” and “above all” not “play[ing] at God.”

          • Oedipa

            The AMA, the insurance industry and many hospitals hire ethicists. I’d assume, if they’re any good at what they do, they’d provide the “special insight” you think doesn’t exist there.

          • http://twitter.com/CalFreiburger Calvin Freiburger

            Really. If one of these ethicist has finally come up with an ethically-compelling rationale for considering abortion a valid and acceptable part of good medical practice, I’d love to see it.

        • liveaction

          Claiming “motivation police” has nothing to do with the actual language of PRENDA. Only doctors who know that a woman is seeking an abortion on the basis of gender would be prosecuted. Nowhere in the bill does it give grounds for doctors to interrogate or investigate women. Only if they know are they to refuse the abortion. So let’s not blow this into a different picture than it actually is…

          • Oedipa

            As you describe it, the law would be entirely unenforceable (which is a pretty good sign it’s a bad law).

          • liveaction

             First, our nation needs to take a stand against gender selection abortions in our laws.  That’s one thing PRENDA would have done.  Secondly, you are incorrect that the law is unenforceable.  You may think it’s unlikely that a doctor would be caught under the law, but many who violate the law in other ways are “unlikely” to be caught.  That doesn’t make the law unenforceable.  Here’s the wording of PRENDA so you can see for yourself:  http://www.govtrack.us/congress/bills/112/hr3541/text

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  • I survived!

    Oedipa,
    Here’s one for you, how about abortion is just plain SICK! Humans killing their offspring. Totally weird. Don’t fall for the BS you’ve been feed. I am a survivor by the way.

    • megrits

       Your words are so true.  Congratulations on being a survivor.

  • Rebecca Downs

    When they make claims such as the ones they are making, it means they haven’t even read or care about the bill… they’re just saying how they want to keep abortion legal in every kind of circumstance and that they don’t care about the rights of unborn women. Such hypocrites! 

    • Oedipa

      Ms. Downs, if you’re referring to the comments by the congresspeople, I think they’re merely dispensing with formalities that might be exercised if this were a bill wasn’t transparently a solution in search of a problem. Ending sex selective abortion isn’t the end game for you; it’s ending abortion. Many of us are already counting the days until the new wave of bills involving other motivational barriers are introduced.

      In any event, take heart. If Boehner wishes to introduce this under the normal floor rules of the House, it will probably pass. At least the House. Then it will die.

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