Sex Selective Abortion is… Feminist?

Ann Furedi, who argues that English law already allows sex-selective abortion.
Ann Furedi, who argues that English law already allows sex-selective abortion.

Sarah Ditum writes for The Guardian “as far as I’m concerned, it doesn’t matter why any woman wants to end her pregnancy. If it’s to select for sex, that’s her choice.”

That’s a radical enough opinion that most people will be repulsed by it without further comment, but further comment is warranted to really explore the tragic, schizophrenic, unscientific, and ultimately misogynistic logic behind it. First: there’s the routine set of mental contortions necessary to deny that abortion is, in fact, the killing of a living human being. No matter how much Ditum may talk about ending pregnancy or refer to the unborn human being as “what’s growing inside you,” the reality is that the sex of your unborn child is determined at conception. It does not “end up as a man or a woman.” He or she (not it) starts out that way. It couldn’t very well be a sex-selective abortion if the gender-fairy didn’t arrive until birth, now could it?

Secondly, Ditum admits that sex-selective abortion couldn’t really be covered by current English law because ostensibly abortions are for the sake of the mother, and the specific sex of the unborn human being shouldn’t have any impact one way or the other on the mother’s health. Then she considers the global perspective:

But what about when a pregnant woman lives in a society that gives her real and considerable reason to fear having a girl? The kind of society where dowry systems mean an inconveniently gendered child could bankrupt a family, or one where a livid patriarch deprived of a male heir could turn his fury on both mother and daughter? In those situations, a woman wouldn’t just be justified in seeking sex selective abortion; she’d be thoroughly rational to do so.

This is a micro-version of the entire feminism/abortion debate, and it illustrates perfectly this plain, simple, uncontestable fact: elective abortion is acquiescence to patriarchy. What does Ditum think you should do in an oppressive society that denigrates the value of women? Clearly the solution, as Ditum states quite frankly, is not to stand up for women’s rights and dignity, but rather it is to enable that oppression. Go along to get along, that’s Ditum’s motto when confronted with rank oppression.

It’s really hard for me to tell the difference between what Ditum calls feminism and what any reasonable person would call collaboration. Rather than stand up for women in need, why not just kill them so as not to rock the patriarchal boat? Apparently feminism really is just code for “concerns of upper-middle class white women” these days, and when it comes to the entrenched power interests of the patriarchy goes, the old saying applies: “If you can’t beat ’em, join ’em.”

9 thoughts on “Sex Selective Abortion is… Feminist?”

  1. So Nathaniel, you are mormon and you are saying Abortion is Murder! You realize the LDS church said that abortion isn’t “murder or compared with deny the Holy Ghost”. Just pointing out your “opinion” disagrees with your own religion!

  2. Also, your comment that “sex” is determined at conception is actually false. I am sure hermaphrodites would disagree, more importantly there are transgender individuals who would also disagree.

    Men love to be holier than though on this issue. I think its comes from a base emotion and the want to control women!

    Reproductive rights is very important to equality! Until the last 50 years (and still occurring in poor countries) a women’s reproductive rights have been controlled by men! I see those who fight against this as men who want to control women!

    Sadly, your post shows a lack of understanding, a level of intolerance, and to some extent sexism.

    As an LDS man, I realize that agency goes far deeper than just saying “we all have agency”. Women need to be able to control their own reproductive rights, other wise men/government takes that agency away from them and then our government/society is forcing fear on women!

  3. danny-

    I appreciate you bringing together all these points in one place. Makes my job a lot easier.

    So Nathaniel, you are mormon and you are saying Abortion is Murder!

    I didn’t say abortion is murder. I said it is the killing of a human being. That is incontrovertible scientific fact. The name for killing a human being is homicide. Some homicide is legal (self-defense) and some is illegal, but not all illegal homicide is murder. There’s also manslaughter, for example. Abortion is most similar to imperfect self-defense.

    You realize the LDS church said that abortion isn’t “murder or compared with deny the Holy Ghost”. Just pointing out your “opinion” disagrees with your own religion!

    Elder Oaks said:

    On this subject our prophetic guidance is clear. The Lord commanded, “Thou shalt not … kill, nor do anything like unto it” (D&C 59:6). The Church opposes elective abortion for personal or social convenience.

    That’s what I say. Abortion is not murder, but it is “like unto it”, and elective abortion is wrong. I don’t ordinarily bring religion into the discussion, but as long as you brought the topic up we might as well get it right.

    Also, your comment that “sex” is determined at conception is actually false. I am sure hermaphrodites would disagree, more importantly there are transgender individuals who would also disagree.

    If it would make you feel better, we can amend my statement to be “Other than hermaphrodites, sex is determined at conception”. About 1/10th of 1% of births are hermaphrodites, so in the other 99.9% of sex-selective abortions the unborn human being who is killed is unambiguously male or female.

    As for your second point, I don’t think you understand transgenderism. The entire point is that sex (a biological category) is different from gender (a social category). Since transgender individuals change gender (not sex) it’s not relevant to my point.

    Men love to be holier than though on this issue. I think its comes from a base emotion and the want to control women!

    Be careful not to learn too much, or it will be very hard for you to maintain this belief.

    As an LDS man, I realize that agency goes far deeper than just saying “we all have agency”.

    Elder Oaks addressed the topic quite explicitly in a great article called Weighter Matters:

    Few concepts have more potential to mislead us than the idea that choice, or agency, is an ultimate goal. For Latter-day Saints, this potential confusion is partly a product of the fact that moral agency—the right to choose—is a fundamental condition of mortal life. Without this precious gift of God, the purpose of mortal life could not be realized. To secure our agency in mortality we fought a mighty contest the book of Revelation calls a “war in heaven.” This premortal contest ended with the devil and his angels being cast out of heaven and being denied the opportunity of having a body in mortal life (see Rev. 12:7–9).

    But our war to secure agency was won. The test in this postwar mortal estate is not to secure choice but to use it—to choose good instead of evil so that we can achieve our eternal goals. In mortality, choice is a method, not a goal.

    The whole thing is worth reading, but it’s sad that it was necessary for him to write it because common sense should have been enough. If you think that agency means not having laws, then why do you think we have any laws at all? Don’t you trust women to make the right decisions for their families? Then why is child abuse illegal? Don’t you trust men and women to make good decisions about how to use their own money? Then why is tax evasion illegal? Every single law that exists would be eliminated if anyone took the logic you’re using seriously.

    Let me just finish up with a quote from an original feminist Elizabeth Cody Stanton:

    We must educate our daughters that maternity is grand, and that God never cursed it, and the curse, if there be any, may be rolled off…..Let woman assert herself in all her native purity, dignity, and strength, and end this wholesale suffering and murder of helpless children. With centuries of degradation, we have so little of true womanhood that the world has but the faintest glimmering of what woman is or should be.

    That’s real feminism.

  4. danny-

    I love how you time and time again say “undisputed scientific fact”.

    I’m starting to wonder if you’re actually pro-life and just trying to pitch me softballs at this point. If so: thanks. If not: here’s the backup for my claim. The first section is expert testimony from scientists. The second is quotations from embryology textbooks.

    Expert Testimony

    “It is incorrect to say that biological data cannot be decisive…It is scientifically correct to say that an individual human life begins at conception.”
    – Professor Micheline Matthews-Roth (Harvard University Medical School)

    “I have learned from my earliest medical education that human life begins at the time of conception.”
    – Dr. Alfred M. Bongioanni (Professor of Pediatrics and Obstetrics, University of Pennsylvania)

    “After fertilization has taken place a new human being has come into being. [It] is no longer a matter of taste or opinion…it is plain experimental evidence. Each individual has a very neat beginning, at conception.”
    – Dr. Jerome LeJeune (Professor of Genetics, University of Descartes)

    “By all the criteria of modern molecular biology, life is present from the moment of conception.”
    – Professor Hymie Gordon (Mayo Clinic)

    “The beginning of a single human life is from a biological point of view a simple and straightforward matter – the beginning is conception.”
    – Dr. Watson A. Bowes (University of Colorado Medical School)

    Embryology Textbooks

    “Human development begins at fertilization, the process during which a male gamete or sperm (spermatozoo developmentn) unites with a female gamete or oocyte (ovum) to form a single cell called a zygote. This highly specialized, totipotent cell marked the beginning of each of us as a unique individual… A zygote is the beginning of a new human being (i.e., an embryo).”
    – Keith L. Moore, The Developing Human: Clinically Oriented Embryology, 7th edition. Philadelphia, PA: Saunders, 2003. pp. 16, 2.

    “Development begins with fertilization, the process by which the male gamete, the sperm, and the femal gamete, the oocyte, unite to give rise to a zygote.”
    – T.W. Sadler, Langman’s Medical Embryology, 10th edition. Philadelphia, PA: Lippincott Williams & Wilkins, 2006. p. 11.

    “[The zygote], formed by the union of an oocyte and a sperm, is the beginning of a new human being.”
    – Keith L. Moore, Before We Are Born: Essentials of Embryology, 7th edition. Philadelphia, PA: Saunders, 2008. p. 2.

    “Although life is a continuous process, fertilization (which, incidentally, is not a ‘moment’) is a critical landmark because, under ordinary circumstances, a new genetically distinct human organism is formed when the chromosomes of the male and female pronuclei blend in the oocyte.”
    – Ronan O’Rahilly and Fabiola Müller, Human Embryology and Teratology, 3rd edition. New York: Wiley-Liss, 2001. p. 8.

    “Human embryos begin development following the fusion of definitive male and female gametes during fertilization… This moment of zygote formation may be taken as the beginning or zero time point of embryonic development.”
    – William J. Larsen, Essentials of Human Embryology. New York: Churchill Livingstone, 1998. pp. 1, 14

    Perhaps the most interesting quote, however, comes from Peter Singer. He’s a famous ethical philosopher who believes abortion should be legal and, because at least he’s intellectually honest, argues that infanticide should be legal too. He writes:

    It is possible to give ‘human being’ a precise meaning. We can use it as equivalent to ‘member of the species Homo sapiens’. Whether a being is a member of a given species is something that can be determined scientifically, by an examination of the nature of the chromosomes in the cells of living organisms. In this sense there is no doubt that from the first moments of its existence an embryo conceived from human sperm and eggs is a human being.

    So here’s my question for you: do you understand yet that abortion does, in fact, involve the killing of a human being?

    LOL, indeed.

  5. I love how you selectively chosen those who agree with your point of view.

    It’s okay, your bias blinds you and your opinion won’t change.

  6. I love how you selectively chosen those who agree with your point of view. It’s okay, your bias blinds you …

    You say that like there are others I could have quoted that don’t agree with me. Please, find me the experts and textbooks that argue that at conception there isn’t a human being present.

    The reality is that everyone who knows what they are talking about, pro-life or pro-choice, understands the basic scientific reality that is the foundation for this debate. I already quoted Peter Singer (who is very, very pro-choice), but here’s Ann Furedi (who was referenced in the OP):

    We can accept that the embryo is a living thing in the fact that it has a beating heart, that it has its own genetic system within it. It’s clearly human in the sense that it’s not a gerbil, and we can recognize that it is human life… the point is not when does human life begin, but when does it really begin to matter?

    Or how about another pro-choice feminist, Naomi Wolf:

    Clinging to a rhetoric about abortion in which there is no life and no death, we entangle our beliefs in a series of self-delusions, fibs and evasions. And we risk becoming precisely what our critics charge us with being: callous, selfish and casually destructive men and women who share a cheapened view of human life…we need to contextualize the fight to defend abortion rights within a moral framework that admits that the death of a fetus is a real death.

    So I’ve now quoted over a dozen embryology textbooks, scientists, and medical doctors and even three prominent pro-choice advocates all of whom agree on the central point that abortion involves killing a human being. Your response, with absolutely zero reasoning or evidence whatsoever, is to say my bias blinds me?

    You do know that you look pretty silly right now, right?

  7. I have to admit that I am curious about one thing, however. If this–what I’ve presented so far–doesn’t look like an evidence-based argument to you, what does?

    I mean, there isn’t a single point I’ve made here that I haven’t backed up with a citation and a source, from the Church’s position on abortion to the central fact that human life starts at conception. I mean, even setting aside the fact that you’ve backed up precisely zero of your claims, I would like to know–in your mind–what you imagine being wrong would look like. Is it something that has happened to you before? And if so, how did you know you were wrong if not by the weight of overwhelming evidence?

    You think my bias blinds me, but the reality is that I’m open minded. I’m just open minded to evidence and logic. Neither of which you’ve presented.

    How about you? What does it take to influence your opinions?

  8. I think you missed my point and sarcasm in my last few statements, and if you think I look silly, I simply don’t care!

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