Washington, DC (LifeNews.com) — Secretary of State Hillary Clinton recently told the New York Times that she opposes sex-selection abortions and is working to do more the combat them. One pro-life advocate is inviting her to support legislation in Congress to accomplish that and notes how her colleagues aren’t as vocal.
In an interview with the New York Times published on Sunday, Clinton acknowledges the problems of sex-selection abortions in some Asian nations.
“Obviously, there’s work to be done in both India and China, because the infanticide rate of girl babies is still overwhelmingly high,” she says.
“Unfortunately, with technology, parents are able to use sonograms to determine the sex of a baby, and to abort girl children simply because they’d rather have a boy. And those are deeply set attitudes,” Clinton continues.
She adds she is seeing “openness and commitment” by the governments of India and China in confronting these practices. [reference]
As you would expect the NYT does not have a follow up question in regards to sex-selection abortion. No question as to how if abortion is a “right” then how does doing it because of the sex of the child then make it a problem. Either it is a human person or it is not. The sex of a “tissue mass” would not matter. Does the women have a so-called choice just as long as the reason is not sex-selection? As is always the case the supporters of abortion are inconsistent. They will talk about reducing abortion while never explain under their philosophy why you would need to reduce a “right”.
The problem of sex-selection while prevalent in some countries is not unknown in the states where U.S. resident Chinese, Korean, and Asian Indian parents are indeed having sex-selection abortions now along with others. Sex selection is also available via In Vitro Fertilization and they use such terms as “family balancing.” Besides sperm separation techniques such as microsort there is PGD, also known as embryo screening and PGS (preimplantation genetic screening), is the only other method of gender selection that has been proven effective. PGD means that a embryo is created and then murdered if it does not match up based on whatever criteria the parent selects such as sex or genetic disease. There are no legal restraints on sex-selection in the United States.
10 comments
Senators are very responsive to mail and email from constituents. Is someone reading this a NY state person. Email her and ask.
So murderers of babies have standards? Sheeeeeesh!
…And these lawmakers influence our way of life through lobbying and legislation. Careful who you vote for.
I think there’s actually another irony here: I haven’t the foggiest idea how anybody could enforce a law against sex-selective abortion, while still allowing abortion essentially on demand. I mean, how do you tell the difference? The way you demonstrate that sex selection is going on is by doing statistics across a population, which simply can’t be done for a single family (especially a fairly small one).
The other irony here—which is, I think, cause for celebration for those of us who actually want to save kids from being killed before birth—is that any law designed to reduce sex-selective abortion has to take the form of some kind of restriction on abortion. Hearing the Left argue for killing fewer babies is good news, even if the reasoning is, well, incoherent.
Peace,
–Peter
I take it your question is rhetorical. If not, the reason is that in many parts of the third world parents will select for males (see The Daughter Deficit http://bit.ly/k6mRd ).
Thus feminism trumps pro-abortion. QED
I’ve never met a pro-abort who had a meaningful answer to this question. Nor have I met one who has a meaningful answer to selective abortions if we were to find fetal testing for homosexuality/transexuality or other gender related issues.
A wise Catholic once said that one of the great ironies of liberalism, especially the anti-Catholic sort, is that one day the Catholics will be the ones fighting liberals to prevent the abortion of homosexuals.
“Obviously, there’s work to be done in both India and China, because the infanticide rate of girl babies is still overwhelmingly high,” she says.
But doesn’t Mrs. Clinton realize that safe and legal abortions of “female” fetuses lowers the infanticide rate of girl babies?
Imagine the leaders of these sex-selecting countries retorting, “Every woman a planned and wanted woman.”
Well, the question I’d ask is this – would she be against sex-selective abortion if the studies showed an overwhelming number of boys being aborted? I’d love to hear her answer that one.
The reason this is troubling to many pro-abortion types (not people in the industry, or lobbyists) is that a great many people don’t pay attention to statistics, numbers, etc. They favor abortion because they believe they are being compassionate to women who are in some sort of crisis situation — whatever fits their idea of “crisis” (poverty, being a college student, incest, genetic disease, simply being a woman in a Third World country, etc.). They believe, without thinking much about it, that abortion is a difficult choice for women whose lives would somehow be ruined by pregnancy, that most abortions are done in the first trimester (which for some reason doesn’t really count to them), and that abortions are rarely done for trivial and/or stupid reasons. This is not true, but it’s what they think. Most Americans would NOT consider sex selection to be a crisis situation, so this violates their vague idea of what actually happens,