The Vile Practice Of Sex Selection Abortion

In the 1990’s there were “116 boys born for every 100 girls” in South Korea (Shin). Gender imbalances also existed in China and India and if selective abortions were outlawed, there may have been “112 million” more girls in Asia (Shin). No doubt, many Korean held tightly to their “Buddhist traditions,” but years later, laws changed, allowing daughters to inherit equally from their parents as sons and prohibiting physicians from revealing a baby’s gender (Shin). As a result, the ratio between boys and girls closed and people began to understand how having a girl just as fortunate as having a boy. Many Korean couples are ecstatic if they find out they have a girl as daughters end up coming back home to care for them, work, and tend for their own kids.

In this short video and article on the topic of gendercide, reporter Elizabeth Vargas travels to India to found out from the people of India personally why there is such a shortage of females. She discovered that although aborting a fetus of a female child is illegal because of the shortage of females, families still continue to abort them because they don't want the burden that the baby girls brings. Vargas also discovered that illegal sex determination clinics can be found just about on every street. Men and their families also the wives to have sex determination tests and abort the baby if it’s female.

Most females are not respected and are heavily pressured by their parents. Many Chinese women are expected to be in arranged marriages and are not respected in their family or the work-place. Woman that aren’t even born yet suffer from infanticide. If the parents came to find that they were having a girl from ultrasound- they would abort that child and try for a boy causing pre-birth ultrasounds to be banned. “Negative social consequences, particularly sex discrimination. With boys being viewed as culturally preferable, the practice of female infanticide was resumed in some areas shortly after the one-child policy took effect.” (Document E) “I hate to say it but the one-child policy should party be blamed for some social issues in youth today.” “She wished she has a brother or sister to share all the attention.” (Document F) This evidence supports the claim that the one-child policy was a bad policy because women have always been culturally no preferable, causing unborn females to be aborted.

Gender issues are central to any culture, because gender is a fundamental means of understanding social reality. Both Australian and Chinese cultures are patriarchal in nature. Last names are carried through the male, not the female. Stereotypes about gender abound in both Australian and Chinese societies. In both Chinese and Australian cultures, it is more likely for a man to be in a position of economic or political power than a woman. Women are more likely to tend to domestic labor. However, Australian culture is more gender egalitarian than Chinese culture. The one-child policy in China has made it so that many families will abort female children in order to have a male child. This would not be considered an ethical

Although the One-Child Policy in China had downfalls, the benefits overcome. In fact, many believe China’s One-Child Policy was not a good idea and had many flaws. I strongly believe China’s One-Child Policy was a sufficient theory in assisting environmental crises, strengthening feminine power, and revealing benefits of having singleton

There are many reasons as to why this practice has become so popular in many countries around the world. It is said that by having a one-child policy, China has increased the rate of abortion of female fetuses. As most Chinese families are given incentives to have only one child, and would

Dena Davis in the 5th chapter of “Genetic Dilemmas: Reproductive Technology, Parental Choices, and Children’s Futures” explores the global attitudes, policies, and morality towards determination of sex. She begins with presenting empirical evidence of some preferences held in countries such as India or China where there is a clear desire for male children. This inclination is so deeply held that mothers can be socially and physically harmed when, by pure biological chance, they fail to produce a male child. Davis and others allow sex selection in these cases, purely in the interest of harm reduction of mothers and their daughters born into such a situation.

The WHO states that there are three core motivations for engaging in sex determination and sex selection which include “medical reasons such as preventing the birth of children affected or at risk of X-linked disorders; family balancing reasons where couples choose to have a child of one sex because they already have one or more children of the other sex; and gender preference reason often in favor of male offspring stemming from cultural, social, and economic bias in favor of male children and as a result of policies requiring couples to limit reproduction to one child, as in China.” In countries such as India and China, it is apparent that women can be harmed by sex selection

In the video documentary on China’s lost girls, we learned about the country’s strange rules. In order to keep the population lower, they have laws only allowing one child. The reason why they do not let peoples families grow is because their country seems to be overpopulated. This video is called China’s lost girls because people of China only want to have boys, and they throw their girls away. The reason for this is boys will keep the family name and stay in the family to take care of their parents when their older. If they have a girl, the girl will marry into another family and take care of her husbands parents and leave her own. The parents

China has the most documented female suicides in any country, approximately 500 women a day (Women's Rights Without Frontiers). Women are forced to undergo abortions, commit acts of infanticide or abandon their babies. Every forced act of gendercide damages the essence of a woman. A woman’s body is no longer hers and the choice of pro-life for her baby is no longer her choice. The Chinese government needs to recognize “the heinous crime against humanity” that it is inflicting on its women by invading their “most intimate part of [their] bod[ies]-physically, emotionally and spiritually” and implement laws to protect them and their babies from these callous procedures (Littlejohn). Fortunately, the recent abolishment of the one-child policy is a stepping stone towards change. The introduction of two-child policy, implemented on October 31, 2015, has allowed families to have two, however as seen from precedent anti-natalist policies, limiting population growth will always come with undesirable impediments. It will take more than the introduction of the two-child policy for Chinese women to heal the wounds that the one-child policy has “inscribed” into

After the one child policy institute, “infant girls have become more likely to die than boys because more families killing their daughters” (Parkinson). Because the firstborn male child is meaningful in Chinese traditional culture, particularly in rural areas even today, as sons can inherit the family name and property from elders. Due to losing of girls. China became the most gender-imbalanced country. According to the report, “The sex ratio at birth (between male and female births) in mainland China reached 117:100 and remained steady between 2000 and 2013, substantially higher than the natural baseline, which ranges between 103:100 and 107:100”(Chen). The sex imbalance will cause a lot of Chinese men hard to find a wife, especially in remote rural

The one-child policy decreases the value of girls in China. In “How Chinese Art Explores Its One- child policy,” Sebag-Montefiore states, “China has the most uneven sex ration in the world, with 117 boys born for every 100 girls. In a culture that traditionally favours male offspring, girls have been abandoned, murdered and aborted” (Sebag- Montefiore). In “China’s One- Child Policy Turns 33 as Forced Abortions, Female Infanticides Continue,” Littlejohn claims: “The one child

Parents hold low expectations for their daughters and teach them to to be obedient at a young age because sons were seen as a greater asset. Filial piety, “the important virtue and primary duty of respect, obedience, and care for one's parents and elderly family members,” plays a key role in a parent’s preference for males (Dictionary.com). Daughters are usually married off, whereas sons not only carry on the family’s household name, but are expected to take care of their parents in the future. It is a repaid debt for the amount of work parents put into providing food, shelter, clothes, and education. Although, it is expected of parents to care for their children, China only allows one child per family -- unless the parents are granted a permit. Therefore, parents continue to exercise sex-selective abortion because of filial piety and the mindset that sons dominate over daughters. In Chinese, filial piety is expressed by the character 孝 (pinyin: xiào). The character xiao is made up of an upper and a lower part. The first part is derived from the character lao (老, pinyin: lǎo), which means ‘old’. The second part is the character 子 (pinyin: zi), which means ‘son’” (Teon, China-journal). The favoritism of males over females is rooted back to the term itself; hence why parents believe that the amount of time and money spent, should be invested on a

China is a good example of infanticide where the family would abort or kill an infant if it wasn’t a boy. The country saw girls as unable to lead, inherit or even project their family and country in times of war. Also, the family feared that if they had a girl she would be forced would need to married at a younger age. This caused a lot of girls to being raped or abused through hard labor being they were being married off to men who were three times their age.

Assuming there should be even numbers of males and females in the human population, there are 150 million women missing, which is greater than the sum of all deaths from every civil conflict and genocide of the 20th century(The Village). This may possibly be the biggest human rights crisis ever, yet nobody knows about it(The Village). Female foeticide and infanticide are the main perpetrators of this injustice. Female foeticide is the sex-selective abortion of girls in the womb, while female infanticide is the sex-selective homicide of an infant under one year of age(Chawla). This heinous and cruel murdering of female fetuses and infants is rampant in India, China, and North Korea; however, the Compassion organization helps save the lives of many young girls through programs such as Mercy, one of their Child Survival Programs.