Reply #67: if I'm reading this correctly ...

[iverglas]

The text above the link in your post is your own. Your expanded version:

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2011/06/19/986695/-Unnatural-Selection-and-163,000,000-Missing-Girls

In view of your point about language and the appeal to the right brain in your other thread, I find this statement curious:

"Cheap ultrasound tests are used to tell them that the mother is carrying a girl."

"The mother"?

Strikes me that this is the kind of language used by the anti-choice brigade, and designed expressly to appeal to the right brain in order to evoke the desired emotional response, i.e. a negative response to the idea of abortion and the freedom to choose abortion.

A slip? ;) Dunno ...

"Call these 'fetuses' or 'unborn children' or 'girls.' The result is the same. Millions of very, very young females are being killed."

That's also a very odd statement. It very much does matter what one calls "these". The actual fact is that millions of births of female human beings are being prevented. No "children" or "girls" are being killed, and equating the "killing" of a fetus with the killing of a human being is not exactly respectful of women or helpful to women's cause, no matter who does it.

I do agree that sex-selection abortions are a social problem. It's a problem of the chicken-and-egg variety.

Pregnancies are terminated when the fetus is female because women are both devalued in ethical terms and, in practical terms, genuinely of lower value to families. To solve the problem, the approach has to be two-pronged (with many offshoots). In China, for instance, it's time for a universal old-age pension scheme; this would go some distance toward eliminating a couple's need for a son, or for children period. In other societies, it means working a lot harder to achieve economic equality for women, which involves enhancing the value the society places on women as human beings with equal dignity and worth as such, so that a daughter can then be seen to be as "valuable" in economic terms as a son.

The adoption of family planning practices is a somewhat parallel example. Couples in developing societies do not begin to limit family size until they have the degree of economic prosperity that frees them to some extent from dependence on children for their economic well-being. Limiting family size in turn enhances their economic prosperity, but most people won't adopt that practice until the evidence of their ability to survive if they do that is present.

So to deter sex-selection abortion that favours male births, couples need to have evidence that a daughter will be as valuable to them as a son, and that means enhancing women's economic and social status to the point where that is true. And of course the women in the couples need to have the personal and social and economic power to make their own choices to overcome residual social and familial preference for sons if they wish to do so.