New Study Shows That Sex-Selective Abortion Bans Are Total Bullshit
Furthermore, the study points out, “although India and China are consistently referred to in legislative debates over sex-selective abortion bans, male-biased sex ratios can be found in many countries throughout the world, including those with predominantly white populations.” The country with the most skewed male-female sex ratio at birth is Liechtenstein, followed by Armenia, Hong Kong and Azerbaijan. India is 5th; China is 8th, after Vietnam and Albania. This isn’t to say that sex selection isn’t a problem worldwide — it is, but it’s not something that can be fixed with misapplied fear-mongering rhetoric that’s both factually incorrect and serves to propagate harmful racist stereotypes.
Finally, the study roundly debunks the blatantly untrue myth that the purpose of these laws is to protect women. Their real purpose, of course, is to make abortion as inaccessible as possible — a vast majority of the politicians who vociferously support them are rabid anti-choicers. And some proponents of sex-selective abortion have been upfront about this: in a 2008 article quoted by the study, an influential conservative thinker wrote that “key to eroding Roe v. Wade… is to pass a number of state or federal laws that restrict abortion rights in ways approved of by at least fifty percent of the public,” such as “a ban on abortion for sex selection.” Many anti-choice groups have taken up this call and created model legislation to ban sex-selective abortion. Meanwhile, after Illinois and Pennsylvania enacted bans in 1984 and 1989, the ratio of boy to girl babies being born in those states remained totally unchanged. So these laws literally accomplish nothing, save for subjecting women seeking abortions to undue scrutiny.
Keeping women from having autonomy over their own bodies is ghastly and retrograde. Cloaking these intentions in rhetoric that feigns to protect women while spreading harmful untruths about Asian American communities is simply unconscionable.
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