...feticide in India is clearly more than just a personal problem, with huge socioeconomic ramifications that are just now being felt.
Yes, sex ratio skew on that scale can unquestionably cause social problems, which is why India's laws against informing pregnant women and their families of the fetus' sex are more than justified, inadequate though they are to address the realities of a vast black market in ultrasounds. For decades before the Indian economist Amartya Sen first called attention to India's widespread sex-selective abortion problem in the late 1980s, India already had a well-known widespread female infanticide problem, and indeed they still do among the poor. Legislation alone won't even come close to solving these problems, nor the various schemes the Indian government has implemented over the past decade to combat them (paying parents in designated high-skew areas like Punjab to keep, vaccinate and educate girls; a network of unwanted-girl-baby dropoff centers; working in tandem with selected leaders from India's various religious communities to instruct their followers that girls have equal value in God's eyes and must be treated as such). Indeed, if the longstanding laws against dowry were meaningfully enforceable, that alone would fix most of the problem by itself.
I've personally seen poorer Indian families bankrupt themselves paying for dowries and weddings for their daughters, and it's heartbreaking. Needless to say, Indian parents love the daughters they do have as dearly as they love their sons; that's not the problem. The problem is a traditional social structure, found across much of East and South Asia, where sons alone owe you support in old age, keep whatever land you have in your family, and bring you new household wealth in the form of daughters-in-law, who come with dowries, move into your house and work for you, and grow your family. Logistically speaking, it's not a bad system in an agrarian society where mutual interdependence runs high, but the stigma that accrues to girls (and childless widows, and infertile women) has awful consequences which endure into modern, middle-class urbanized family lives.
This situation really doesn't map well at all onto the parameters of the abortion rights debate in the United States.
And, just to make it clear, if any place qualifies as a gulag, it's this one -- a place where abortions were cheap, unregulated, and incredibly dangerous, albeit legal. ...
There's a whole world of obstetrics malpractice horror stories waiting to be dipped into, too...It really is not relevant to the debate. In any case, the way our country ghettoizes abortion provision in freestanding abortion clinics rather than hospitals, where all abortions are performed in most of the world, virtually guarantees such incidences.
Pregnancy care centers do indeed offer information about abortion (though they don't generally offer referrals), as one of a host of options when it comes to dealing with an unwanted pregnancy.
They acknowledge that abortion is an option because they have to, and they often offer post-abortion counseling (as do numerous pro-choice organizations, which most abortion providers offer referrals to). That's about it.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crisis_pregnancy_center
Crisis pregnancy centers (CPCs), also known as pregnancy resource centers, are non-profit organizations established to counsel women against having abortion. CPCs are typically run by pro-life Christians according to a conservative Christian philosophy, and often operate under the auspices of one of three groups: Care Net, Heartbeat International, and Birthright International. The National Institute of Family and Life Advocates (NIFLA) was formed to provide legal advice to American CPCs.
There are over 4000 CPCs in the United States, as compared with well under 750 abortion clinics...At least 20 US States provide funding for CPCs.
...While CPCs often look like abortion clinics and are intentionally located near them, the overwhelming majority are not legally licensed as medical clinics and do not offer medical services. Most CPCs offer free pregnancy tests, often over-the-counter ones, and there is a movement towards obtaining medical clinic status, largely so that more CPCs may offer sonograms in an attempt to convince women to carry their pregnancies to term. They may also provide STD screening, adoption referrals, religious counseling, financial assistance, prenatal services, child-rearing resources and other services.
All of which are useful and important services to offer interested mothers-to-be, but state-mandated visits to CPCs as a condition of obtaining an abortion--as if understanding the potential medical consequences of abortion required understanding how the adoption process works, or what social services for pregnancy support are out there--is unmistakably a way of saying, "And before we'll allow you to exercise this right, we require you to sit through our reminders of why you shouldn't actually have it to begin with." Either accept the principle that all rights-bearing subjects of law have the same fundamental claim to bodily autonomy as all others, barring mental incapacity to exercise it, or don't accept it. State-mandated "options" counseling is coercion.
Nathan, BVS, Irvine, and a few others seem to be the only ones who are able to rationally discuss this.
I don't think that's fair. Just because someone has stronger personal feelings than most on some particular issue, abortion or race or freedom of religion or whatever, doesn't mean they can't think rationally about it. If someone can't debate, say, whether some politician's comment was racist without screaming that their opponents are disgusting cross-burning neanderthals, yes, that's irrational, but the general presence of agitation or indignation or sarcasm in someone's tone doesn't tell you their reasoning is inferior to yours. It just tells you this topic has strong personal import for them. A person who approaches discussion with an open heart as well as an open mind should be able to work with that situation.
It affects me too.
I was almost aborted.
As was I; my mother had a large uterine tumor throughout her pregnancy, which could potentially have caused her fatal hemorrhaging and, in her doctors' assessment, made it considerably more likely than not that she'd miscarry or have a stillbirth anyway. She never held that over my head though, nor should she have, and for my part I've never been troubled by the thought that she seriously considered it. People are precious to each other because each of us is precious to his or her own self first, and in engaging with others we find the same in them, at least when our consciences are working right. That recognition is the basis for all concepts of justice and liberty, not legal fictions about the inalienable rights of individuals, which don't objectively speaking exist at all.
Being a woman and a mother of three does inform my perspective on abortion. Owing my own existence in large part to one woman's will to bring me into the world, a condition I share with everyone else on the planet, does not.
Nice typo, cori.
