23 January, 2007 | Leave a Comment
China’s top “family planner” has stated that it will take 15 years to reverse the country’s gender imbalance. The government has now vowed to crack down on those performing gender testing via ultrasound and sex-selective abortions. I imagine the worldwide revulsion and horror over recent reports of the millions of missing women in their country contributed to them taking action – or at least, their claim that they will take action.
I’m pro-choice, even if the choice is made for the vilest reasons. As such, I think that anyone who wants to abort a fetus because it is female should be allowed to do just that. Why should people with such views be forced to have a daughter? They don’t deserve to have one and no little girl should be sentenced to life with parents like that. Rather than focusing on punishing those who facilitate this kind of behavior, the government should put all of their energy and resources into creating a society where girls are valued as much as boys. Such programs are in place, apparently, but they seem completely inadequate.
The most interesting part of the government statement is this (summarized by China Daily):
The authorities also pledged to improve protection of baby girls, saying that people who kill, abandon or injure infant girls or ill-treat their mothers, should be severely punished.
The Chinese government’s position is that infanticide and neglect of females is rare. I guess not. Apparently, this sort of behavior must exist at an alarming level. And they’ve just acknowledged that those who commit such heinous acts are not, at this point in time, severely punished. It’s sickening that there is now such urgency in protecting little girls, when they’ve known about these practices for decades and have done nothing. Only now that the government is stuck with a gender imbalance have these issues taken priority. But then I guess the one-child policy needed to be enforced no matter what and those who would kill or abandon little girls were just doing the government’s dirty work for them.
Anglofille said @ 3:10 pm | feminism, news & politics |
- Comments RSS | TrackBack URI
-
gadfleye Says:
January 23rd, 2007 at 3:22 pmChina proves that totalitarianism and capitalism can coexist quite nicely together.
-
What about if someone is going to have a child with down’s syndrome and decides to have an abortion? Or even a child who is gay? I see this as becoming a more and more controversial issue in the future with all of this advanced technology that we have.
-
Fetuses with Down Syndrome are already aborted at a high rate. If the technology ever exists to discover whether a child will be gay or ugly or fat or short or stupid, I’m sure many people will choose to abort those fetuses too. It’s going to be a huge issue of medical ethics. As we’ve seen in China and soon India, when people screw with Mother Nature, the consequences are dire. I don’t have the answers, but I certainly don’t want the right to abortion taken away on account of a certain percentage who will be determined to create some sort of master race of “perfect” humans that would make Hitler proud.
As for the situation in China, I don’t think people should be forced to carry a female fetus to term. There are already so many abandoned and neglected girls. Anyone who wants to abort a female fetus and is stopped by the government might very will kill, abuse or abandon the baby when it’s born. I don’t think any child should be born into that situation.
As you can tell from my many posts on this topic, I find this whole issue to be utterly heartbreaking. What is happening in China and India is the ultimate manifestation of misogyny.
-
ITA with your comment, Anglofille.
