New tests will reveal a baby’s sex at seven weeks. Ostensibly, this information can be used by parents “at risk” of passing on sex-based diseases, although even in most of those cases, the result will not be treatment of the disease but the elimination of the baby. Andrea Mrozek says this will used for target and eliminate girls babies. Indeed, everyone knows that it will be used to eliminate unborn baby girls, who are the overwhelming majority of sex-selection victims. The fact that these abortions can be done at seven or eight weeks instead of 15 (when the current most accurate estimates of sex are done), will certainly make it easier for those who do not want a girl to get rid of her. Most of the reaction news stories seems to oppose sex-selection abortion if it is a parental or cultural preference; the Timestory linked to above even features Arthur Caplan, an avowed abortion supporter, questioning the ethics of sex-selection abortion. But why is killing off a baby because a parent prefers a baby of the opposite sex any different than killing off a baby because it might — might — suffer from a particular sex-based disease. Both are actually sex-selection abortion and the result in both cases is a dead baby, but in one it is dressed up as medical care. Here’s what Time wrote about Caplan:
“Should genetic testing — in combination with abortion — purely for sex selection be part of medicine?” asks ethicist Arthur Caplan in a piece that ran on MSNBC.com this week. “Is it ethical to end a pregnancy because you don’t want a girl? The answer to both questions is ‘no.’ Being male or female is not a disease or a disorder. Wanting a boy is a preference, but it is not one that justifies ending a pregnancy.
Not wanting a baby with hemophilia is also a preference. Not wanting a baby with trisomy13 is a preference. Not wanting a baby with any disease is a preference. Some parents — very few parents — want to give birth to their fatally flawed children and love and care for them for the brief time they might be allowed, but many parents prefer not to go throw that. Unfortunately, to save themselves that grief, they and their doctors play God and often eliminate children who would live short or troubled lives. That is still a preference.
If abortion is okay, then the reasons for them shouldn’t really matter.* As the Abortioneers like to say, there is no hierarchy of choice. Excuse the phraseology, but once you have determined that abortion is permissible, you can’t really pick and choose the reasons that are fine.
See our editorial on gendercide from the August edition of The Interim.
* I appreciate the limits of that argument, but you understand my rhetorical point.
