Raising Some Questions Pro-Aborts Don't Want to Face

Putting abortion advocates in a box

Kelly McParland, National Post Published: Tuesday, April 13, 2010

I'm having trouble understanding the logic behind opposition to the use of abortion as a means to let parents pick the sex of their baby.
Plenty of studies show that many parents will choose abortion to avoid having a baby of the "wrong" sex. Most often, they preferentially abort girls, especially within cultures in which men are seen as more valuable.
Many Canadians see this as wrong. The official policy of professional groups such as the Society of Obstetrics and Gynecology of Canada (SOGC) condemns sex selection. Brendan Leier, a bio-ethicist at Edmonton's Stollery Children's Hospital, and Dr. Allison Thiele, an obstetrics and gynecology resident at the University of Saskatchewan, suggest in the current issue of the Journal of Obstetrics and Gynecology of Canada that physicians should delay imparting information on a baby's sex until it is too late for the woman to have an abortion with no questions asked. Doctors in British Columbia already follow that practice, refusing to reveal the sex until 20 weeks into a pregnancy.
But how does that make sense? In order to support "a woman's right to choose," you have to believe that a fetus is not human in the moral sense. This judgment -- or lack thereof -- is encoded in Canadian law, which permits abortion for any reason, or no reason at all.
If you believe a fetus is not a human life, the fetus becomes no different from any other unwanted appendage on a woman's body. There is no moral difference to removing it than there is to removing an unwanted mole, or an unsightly wart. It's just a bunch of flesh, with no human soul or spirit to it, so what's the difference?
Why, then, would abortion proponents object to women having abortions because they don't like the sex of the fetus? If a fetus is not human, a woman has the right to abort it for whatever reason she chooses: because she doesn't feel like going through the process; because it might interfere with her career plans; because she doesn't like children in general; or because she loves Starbucks and someone told her she'd have to give up caffeine during the pregnancy. What, no latte?
For most of us, of course, abortion is a morally serious procedure, far more complicated than having a mole removed. But if you're pro-choice, everything I've written in the paragraphs above applies.
Abortion is legal in B.C., just as it is in the rest of the country, so holding back information from a pregnant woman can have no justification. The fact that B.C. doctors go along with the antisex-selection policy suggests they don't really believe the twaddle they pass on about human life not beginning until the magic moment when a fetus is able to live and breath on its own, and thus "becomes" human.
There are obvious implications arising from the practice of gender selection, as India and China both have discovered. A 2006 study estimated 10-million female fetuses had been aborted in India in the previous two decades; the growing gap makes it harder for men to find wives. Fewer marriages puts pressure on the birth rate. Try keeping up the population when women are aborting all the little girls.
But so what? If a fetus isn't human, its sex becomes irrelevant. You can't have it both ways.

H/T: Catholic Dialogue (Putting abortion advocates in a box )