Once again I find myself taking issue with Jeff Jacoby, my least favorite columnist in the shrinking stable of Boston Globe op ed writers. On Sunday, 4/6, Jacoby writes about a recent study which reveals that Asian-Americans, and Indian-Americans having multiple births, show a marked bias towards boys in second and third births where the first, or first and second births have been girls. The study concludes that in these populations, sex selection is occurring in greater numbers of pregnancies.
Jacoby uses this study to launch a rant against abortion and the “theology of ‘choice’ which elevates the right to abortion above all other considerations.” Jacoby seems to accept (reluctantly) that these practices go on in developing nations, where having boys is obviously a “rational” preference as a consequence of cultural traditions. It’s all right as long as the practice stays where it belongs, in far away China or India. It is not all right in the U.S. of A., where we should know better.
I would like to inform Mr. Jacoby, that the idea of sex selection in this country is not exactly a new one. Old wives tales abound about how one can conceive a boy instead of a girl or vice versa. Thermometers and daily temperature charts used to be the available technology, combined with the timing of intercourse. Did it work? Maybe sometimes. Now, there are ever more accurate and earlier means for determining the gender of the fetus, and hence, earlier opportunities to abort and try again.
As one who subscribes to the idea of a woman’s choice as a guiding principle in the decision to abort, I can’t say that I think aborting a female fetus because you want to have a male child is what I personally would choose. I can, however, see how someone from a culture which has valued boys above girls might want to make that choice. She (and her partner) will have to live with whatever guilt that decision may provoke. Mr. Jacoby thinks there should be a law against such abortions. He is of the ilk who would ban all abortions, and this is yet another way that the pro-life movement can erode the current law of the land, which gives the pregnant mother the right to choose an abortion.
If abortion for sex selection became illegal, then every decision to abort would have to go through the scrutiny of the law to make sure sex selection was not the reason. Currently, women do not have to give a reason as to why they want to abort. And that is because it is no one’s business but theirs.
I think Mr. Jacoby misses the point of what the real issue is, in his effort to use this study to buttress arguments against abortion. The real point is two-fold. First, we have in this instance yet another example of our technology outstripping our ethical understanding and second, we have the dominant culture in this country casting stones at the sub-dominant cultures whose traditions we dislike.
Potential solutions to the use of genetic testing, ultrasound and blood-testing to determine the sex of a fetus, might be to place a moratorium on those tests while ethicists and ordinary people discuss what is morally right and what is morally wrong. Consider also, a discussion with persons of other cultural backgrounds as to why they feel the need or the desire to perpetuate a particular cultural tradition, and just what the tradition means to them. A question which could be taken up in conversations around the country might be “Why are male children more valued than female children?” It is not unusual to hear of families “trying one more time to have a child of the opposite gender, even in our alleged superior, first world culture.
Jacoby ends his column by saying “You don’t have to be a feminist to know that being a girl is not a birth defect, or to be horrified by a practice that lethally reinforces the most benighted forms of sexual discrimination. For what kind of feminist would it be who could contemplate the use of abortion to eliminate ever-greater numbers of girls, and not cry out in horror?” At that conclusion, I want to laugh to hear him on his high horse as if he really supported feminism. In fact, being a girl IS still a birth defect in this culture if you examine women’s wages, the number of women in positions of power, the number of women killed by violent men, etc. And perhaps Mr. Jacoby hasn’t noticed any of the not-so-subtle sexism in the media that Hillary Clinton is trying to overcome in order to become the Presidential nominee of her party.
All I can say is that abortion for sex selection isn’t my cup of tea, but I think it’s way better than the infanticide of girl babies and children previously practiced (and still practiced) in some cultures. Or, say, selling your girl child into slavery or prostitution. So Jeff, I’m not yet prepared to “cry out in horror” at this new phenomenon in our country.
William Saleton wrote in Slate.com, a much more cogent opinion, I thought. To wit:
“Technology can facilitate regression as easily as it facilitates progress. But if you think of yourself as a pro-life conservative, the data should humble you, too. In the populations in which it has increased, sex selection isn't a newfangled perversion. It's a custom, and a patriarchal one at that. If the sex-selection story teaches us all to be a bit more skeptical of both tradition and technology, that'll be real progress.”
