Female Feticide in the US

I’m guessing the title grabs one’s attention, so here’s the story. Recently, the US shot down a proposed law to address the issue of selective abortion of female fetuses. Which surprised me on two counts:

1)      Did that mean Americans prefer male children over female the way Indians and Chinese do?

2)     Had the scale of such gender based abortions reached the point for the need for such a law even in the US?

Then I read that several women’s organizations had opposed the law. That didn’t make sense: surely, women’s organizations should support such a law, I thought. So I decided to read up more on this.

Turns out the proposed law would impose fines and prison terms on the doctors (not the person undergoing abortion) who performed such sex selective abortions. Many legislators voted against the law because it was unfair to expect the doc to identify the reason for an abortion.

Women’s organizations opposed it because they didn’t want abortion to get banned altogether and considered this as a possible first step in that direction.

Lastly, the law was proposed because the practice of selective abortions was prevalent among Asian, specially Indians and Chinese. And many questioned why the laws of the land needed to be changed because of how minority groups behaved.

Maybe there’s a lesson in that last reason for India. Maybe it’s time we made laws that made sense for the majority (except the ones dealing with discrimination or violence etc) rather than bending backwards to accommodate every whim of the minorities…