Girls of Canada

January 18, 2012 11:37 AM

In an editorial (PDF) in the Canadian Medical Association Journal this week, interim Editor-in-Chief Rajendra Kale suggests that the sex of a fetus, determined by ultrasound, should not be revealed until after 30 weeks of pregnancy to prevent the selective abortion of females, common in other countries and taking place in some immigrant communities in Canada.

An accompanying CMAJ article describes the selective abortion of females taking place in countries like China, India, Korea and Vietnam, and how such practices are being imported to Canada by immigrants from these countries:

The natural ratio of males-to-females at birth is already slightly male-biased at 1.05, or 105 males to every 100 females. Though the sex ratio for first births among first generation South and East Asian immigrants to Canada is only slightly higher than the norm at about 1.08, the ratios become increasingly skewed for each subsequent birth where all previous children are female. For example, the sex ratio for third births to Chinese, Korean and Vietnamese immigrants who already have two daughters is 1.39. For Indians, that ratio is 1.90 — almost two boys born for every girl, according to a working paper prepared for the United States National Bureau of Economic Research

Some Canadian provinces already ban the selection of implanted embryos among women undergoing in vitro fertilization by sex, but such laws don't extend to fetuses. The Society of Obstetricians and Gynecologists of Canada said that Kale' s proposal is inconsistent with their policy, which states that "a patient's request for disclosure should be respected, either directly or in a report to the referring health professional." And that "The SOGC feels strongly that it is the cultural values and norms in specific segments of the Canadian population that must change to ensure that females are not confronted with procedures and intolerant environments before or after they are born."

posted by 2bucksplus (85 comments total)

I should add: In Canada, doctors rarely perform abortions after 22 weeks of pregnancy unless the baby has a lethal fetal abnormality or the mother's life is in danger because of the pregnancy. Sex is usually disclosed at 20 weeks.
posted by 2bucksplus at 11:38 AM on January 18

I heard this and thought it odd. I was under the impression that the gender was already kept from future parents, it was for our friends I believe. The ultrasound tech wouldn''t tell us, (this was 11 years ago however) but our obstetrician did with the proviso that they were making an exception because we were pregnant with twins.

I also thought that all the signs/ads for "3D ultrasound" in private clinics was a way around this for people.

For the record, it was mostly my wife who was pregnant, I am still carrying my food baby around however. Apparently it's still not at term.
posted by Keith Talent at 11:50 AM on January 18

I heard this and thought it odd. I was under the impression that the gender was already kept from future parents, it was for our friends I believe. The ultrasound tech wouldn''t tell us, (this was 11 years ago however) but our obstetrician did with the proviso that they were making an exception because we were pregnant with twins.

I understand its a liability issue, many ultrasound techs where disclosing the sex even though they really didn't have the training and were getting it wrong.
posted by papercrane at 11:57 AM on January 18

I also thought this was already done. All over the hospital here there are signs that say they won't reveal the results of any pregnancy scan and not to ask.
posted by kanata at 12:02 PM on January 18

You can buy portable ultrasound machines for less than 10 grand. I imagine a layman could be taught to recognize gender in a day or two. That's "pay the neighborhood ultrasound guy $20 to drop by and scan me" territory. There is no way to hide this information from people, if they really want to know.
posted by CaseyB at 12:03 PM on January 18 [1 favorite]

This doesn't sound very reasonable to me. I imagine it would lead to most people being denied information they want and could use for good purposes (choosing names, clothes, or whatever else might be colored by gender) while anyone committed enough to aborting a female would find another method to determine the gender.
posted by PJLandis at 12:04 PM on January 18

Deciding which reasons to have an abortion are good or moral enough creeps me out. Exactly why you want it gone shouldn't be anyone's business, only the fact that you want it out of your body.
posted by ROU_Xenophobe at 12:05 PM on January 18 [19 favorites]

You can find out the sex as early as your 18-20 week ultrasound in Canada.

I got my ultrasound done at 17 weeks, and the tech would have told me the sex if I had wanted to know. She also would have put it on my chart so that my doctor had it. Since I didn't want to know the sex, she put U (undetermined) on my chart so that even my doc can't see it.
posted by arcticwoman at 12:05 PM on January 18

good purposes (choosing names, clothes, or whatever else might be colored by gender)

While possibly nice to have, those aren't really morally good reasons to disclose. It wasn't something that was done 25-30 years ago with any regularity.
posted by cobaltnine at 12:06 PM on January 18

In Vancouver, I couldn't get an ultrasound tech or a doctor to tell me the sex of my babies. I don't know if it's all hospitals, but my hospital said no way and that it could be used for ulterior motives and so on. I am a bit surprised that you can find out outside of Vancouver, unless you have amnio.
posted by Chaussette and the Pussy Cats at 12:07 PM on January 18

The even bigger story is how the right-wing papers are now using this as a wedge to write daily editorials against, clamoring for the laws to be struck down.
posted by Theta States at 12:08 PM on January 18

All over the hospital here there are signs that say they won't reveal the results of any pregnancy scan and not to ask.

This might be just to protect the ultrasound techs and docs. At our radiology clinic the techs are pretty much not allowed to talk to you about anything. Every scan has to go to a doctor before anyone can comment. No I can't tell you if that thing that looks exactly like a broken bone is indeed broken, you have to wait for the doctor. Our clearly makes an exception for fetal sex, but maybe others are stricter. Any case, that's not a government rule, that would be a clinic-by-clinic determination.
posted by arcticwoman at 12:09 PM on January 18

This CTV article is interesting, and goes into some of the policies in place already.
posted by papercrane at 12:12 PM on January 18

They should reveal the sex, let the people who would get an abortion because it's a girl get one, and then in the next generation those male children will have to marry outside of their community (since there won't be enough brides for everybody), solving the problem.
posted by joannemerriam at 12:14 PM on January 18 [7 favorites]

Deciding which reasons to have an abortion are good or moral enough creeps me out. Exactly why you want it gone shouldn't be anyone's business, only the fact that you want it out of your body.

So, you're cool with gendercide?
posted by No Robots at 12:14 PM on January 18 [4 favorites]

“It’s a girl!”— could be a death sentence

This editorial, referring to female feticide, as well as the supporter of this motion who was quoted on the CBC the other day, who spoke of "saving lives" -- it may be well intentioned, but it's very worrying language in terms of abortion access. Granted, I am no medical expert, and the descriptions of a fetus having a life may very well be correct medically, but I am concerned that this terminology (and this entire argument) could be coopted by those looking to restrict or eliminate abortion access.

I find the practice of selection on the basis of sex abhorrent; however, in my mind, we either support reproductive freedom, or we do not. We either support a woman's right to choose -- for whatever reason -- or we do not. If a woman is to have the freedom to choose, she is to have that freedom without restriction, and best to provide her with the full information she deems necessary.

Like the practice of abortion itself, should a woman really want information on gender, she can find other ways and methods to obtain it, and do we really want to encourage those other, likely more unsafe methods?

Again, I'm not a supporter of the practice of gender selection, and find it morally repugnant. But I do support a woman's right to choose, and for whatever reasons she sees as appropriate.
posted by Capt. Renault at 12:15 PM on January 18 [36 favorites]

They told us with our boys, and that was 18 and 16 years ago, so I'm surprised that the current rule now is not to tell, though I'm sure lots of people are told the sex inccorectly, based on the technician's best guess.

I don't have any problem with this idea, though. Choosing clothes and colors and all that can easily happen after 30 weeks, which is still over two months away (pregnancy is actually 40 weeks, not 36, as people who haven't had kids sometimes think from the "nine months" deal). And you can have boy and girl names picked out early, just in case.

Most baby showers (where you might get "boy" or "girl" themed items) don't happen until late in the pregnancy, anyway. Miscarriages happen most frequently in the first trimester, so some expectant parents wait until after then to even tell anyone they are pregnant already. And an amniocentesis might be performed if developmental concerns are an issue, and those are usually done between 15 and 20 weeks, so some people wait even later to make their pregnancies public.

Not sure why they picked 30 weeks as opposed to 28 or 26 or whatever, but it's really nothing other than an inconvenience to wait to find out the sex.
posted by misha at 12:18 PM on January 18

From the linked article:

The editorial also did not consider tests on the market that give expectant parents a fetal sex determination of high accuracy as early as eight weeks into a pregnancy, [The Society of Obstetricians and Gynecologists of Canada] notes.

Not sure what purpose a bar on declaring the sex of a fetus via ultrasound would serve in that case.
posted by hat at 12:18 PM on January 18 [1 favorite]

Sex selection is awful, but I don't think this is the proper response.

First, as a matter of law, how does it make sense that in Canada you can legally abort a fetus because, say, you decide you want to take a trip to Florida and having a baby would be inconvenient, but you can't abort a fetus because it's a girl and having a girl would be inconvenient? If abortions are legal, and it's up to the woman to choose, then I don't see why the government gets to start dictacting what reasons are acceptable reasons to make that choice. Freedom of choice means that some people are going to make decisions for reasons we don't approve of. If we think that the fetus has certain inherent moral rights (like the right to be born, irrespective of the mother's wishes), then we should be talking about banning abortion under certain circumstances (for all women).

Second, the author explicitly rejects confining this refusal to disclose only to women of Chinese or Indian/South Asian backgrounds - the communities in which this is a problem. Sure, it would be racist to do so, but let's think about why racism is so bothersome. Imagine being told as a Chinese patient, I'm not telling you the sex of your fetus because a small subset of people like you (pregnant Chinese women) might do something wrong with that information, so we can't allow you to have that information. That's pretty offensive. But that's the policy he's proposing to extend to ALL women, vastly worsening the number of people whose right to information is infringed. The policy will be, because a tiny minority of people like you (pregnant women) can't be trusted with this information, you can't have it. It's deeply patronizing to women as a whole.

Third, as many media reports have pointed out, there will soon be urine or at-home blood tests available that will tell you the sex of your fetus, so this whole exercise is likely to be for naught. Also, families determined to find out the sex of their infant can just drive down to Buffalo or Seattle and pay to have an ultrasound. This won't really be a deterrent, but it will infringe millions of womens' right to know about their pregnancy.
posted by Dasein at 12:19 PM on January 18 [13 favorites]

So, you're cool with gendercide?

No, but the solution to that problem is promoting women's rights and equality, not restricting a woman's right to know about her body (i.e. the fetus) and her access to medical procedures (i.e. abortion). Preventing sex-selective abortion is treating the symptom, not the disease. It does nothing to counter the underlying problems of the unequal treatment and valuation of women and girls.
posted by jedicus at 12:20 PM on January 18 [13 favorites]

If you're worried about selective abortion, maybe you should work on changing the culture that causes people to prefer sons instead of engaging in the kind of paternalism that causes people to prefer sons.
posted by callmejay at 12:20 PM on January 18 [36 favorites]

I apologize for just inventing the word womens.
posted by Dasein at 12:21 PM on January 18 [1 favorite]

I understand that across an entire society the sex ratio can be important but I'm kind of squicked out by the idea of a government inserting itself into that decision. If you're already at the step where you're allowing abortions based on non-medical factors (which I am fine with) than it seems unreasonable to outlaw (or go to great lengths to try to prevent) the exercising of a particular preference in making the decision to abort. In that situation it's not like you're protecting an individual from discrimination, more like protecting a concept (gender equality) and the hypothetical well-being of future members of an over abundant gender.

Additionally, it seems kind of unethical to withhold information from a parent about their own body/pregnancy for policy reasons.

Especially in a multicultural societies like Canada and the United States it seems like gender-equality in certain communities would be a self-correcting problem.
posted by ghharr at 12:22 PM on January 18

Saving unborn fetuses that may grow up to be women by denying actual living women information about their pregnancies seems illogical to me.
posted by Sidhedevil at 12:24 PM on January 18 [2 favorites]

Additionally, it seems kind of unethical to withhold information from a parent about their own body/pregnancy for policy reasons.

The CTV article I linked to suggests it might also be illegal.

... the Supreme Court of Canada, in the case of McInerney v. MacDonald, had ruled in 1992 that patients' medical information is not owned by their physicians and must be surrendered at a patient's request.
posted by papercrane at 12:26 PM on January 18

tests on the market that give expectant parents a fetal sex determination of high accuracy as early as eight weeks into a pregnancy

Well, then, yeah, it seems like it won't make any difference.

I don't really think waiting to find out the sex would be infringing on a woman's reproductive rights, but I do support her right to choose based on whatever criteria she needs, so I can see where you are coming from, Capt. Renault.

That argument is inherently problematic in places like China already, though, where the woman already may not be CHOOSING to abort the female freely, but being pressured to do so by her family or spouse because of the one-child law and the cultural bias which views female babies as being a "burden."
posted by misha at 12:27 PM on January 18

That argument is inherently problematic in places like China already, though, where the woman already may not be CHOOSING to abort the female freely, but being pressured to do so by her family or spouse because of the one-child law and the cultural bias which views female babies as being a "burden."

You're neglecting the possibility of pressure put on Canadian women to abort against their will. Sure, there's no one-child law. But there's still plenty of macho bullshit.
posted by No Robots at 12:31 PM on January 18 [1 favorite]

This was standard practice in Canada at least as early as 2008 when I was last there.
posted by Naberius at 12:32 PM on January 18

Well, gender selection seems (anecdotal and real conversations here) like an unethical practice carried out by the P naught generation of immigrant families from many and varied ethnic backgrounds due to financial, social, and familial pressures. The P1 generations onward tend to lose or ignore the pressures and practices that promote gender selection, aggressive cultural rediscovery phases excepted.

The only solution I can see that wouldn't go against my own pro-choice inclinations or the principles of democracy in general is to simply live and let die. The older generation will pass on and the new generations will be less and less inclined towards the older traditions, gender selection included.
posted by Slackermagee at 12:32 PM on January 18 [1 favorite]

It won't work. Testing technology will tend to get a) earlier and b) more easily available, making such a law obsolete/impotent.
posted by polymodus at 12:33 PM on January 18

This gender selection issue seems to be inextricably tied up with Canada's immigration policies. It's a fact that Caucasian Canadian women have been below the replacement birth rate of 2.1 children per women for some time. Canada's population growth is due to a combination of immigration (approximately 330,000 new permanent residents a year if I remember correctly) and in-Canada births. There is still a long backlog of permanent resident visa applications in many Canadian overseas missions, stretching to 2+ year wait times in some cases.

An interesting question: If the Canadian government were to notice that the national gender ratio was becoming overly skewed, could or would it consider fast tracking immigration visa applications from qualified female applicants?
posted by thewalrus at 12:35 PM on January 18

I was always offered the information about the gender of my babies by my midwives at the fourth month ultrasound. They also made sure to have an appointment just with me (both before and after the births) where they could confidentally discuss domestic abuse and make sure all the decisions I was making were ones I was comfortable with.

Funny how this angle on abortion (bad immigrants using it for evil purposes!) is suddenly being brought into National Atttention while we have a right wing government.
posted by saucysault at 12:43 PM on January 18 [1 favorite]

Funny how this angle on abortion (bad immigrants using it for evil purposes!) is suddenly being brought into National Atttention while we have a right wing government.

Christ on a stick. This was a fucking editorial in a medical journal. IT'S NOT STEPHEN HARPER'S FAULT. Jesus, Metafilter is a like a parody of the paranoid left sometimes.
posted by Dasein at 12:45 PM on January 18 [10 favorites]

I find where this kind of thinking could go troubling. All right, sex selective abortion is permissible. How about based on other criteria if they were prenatally identifiable? Autism? Skin color? Homosexuality? Athletic ability? None of this is out of the realm of future possibility, and I worry that the ability to selectively abort based on the attributes of the baby/fetus could amplify all kinds of conventional discrimination. Saying this is a vanishing trend among immigrant families ignores that selective abortion might become a more widespread issue as testing becomes possible for other traits.
posted by Wemmick at 12:45 PM on January 18

So, you're cool with gendercide?

On fetuses? Sure. It seems stupid, but that's the woman's business, not mine. The only important thing to me is that she no longer consents to carry the fetus to term.

Denying someone truthful information because they might use that information to make an informed decision to withdraw their consent for something that they can legally withdraw their consent from is just creepy, pretty well* irrespective of whatever the thing being consented to (or not) is.

You're neglecting the possibility of pressure put on Canadian women to abort against their will. Sure, there's no one-child law. But there's still plenty of macho bullshit.

It would be la-la-la fairies and unicorns thinking to say this about the US, but for Canada I'm reasonably comfortable saying that the right answer to this problem is widespread publicizing of women's rights and the development of a safety net and physical protective capacity that is strong enough to realistically allow such women to DTMFA and get on with their lives with their little girls, if that's their preference. Some women will, no doubt, still choose to abort their female fetus, maybe because that's actually their preference too or maybe because their upbringing left them all fucked up.

*I'm sure you could come up with something, somewhere, somehow where I'd want to conceal the information. Oh noes, hypocrisy: I haz it.
posted by ROU_Xenophobe at 12:48 PM on January 18 [5 favorites]

In other news, the good doctor has just been told that he will not, in fact, be making the transition from his present position of Acting CMAJ editor-in-chief to actual CMAJ editor-in-chief. Sparking discussion on controversial issues outside the profession, it seems, is not within the mandate of the job.
posted by Mike D at 12:49 PM on January 18 [2 favorites]

All right, sex selective abortion is permissible. How about based on other criteria if they were prenatally identifiable? Autism? Skin color? Homosexuality? Athletic ability? None of this is out of the realm of future possibility, and I worry that the ability to selectively abort based on the attributes of the baby/fetus could amplify all kinds of conventional discrimination. Saying this is a vanishing trend among immigrant families ignores that selective abortion might become a more widespread issue as testing becomes possible for other traits.

Restricting the right to make a decision about whether to continue with a pregnancy because We Might Turn Into Gattaca, OMG, is not a good argument. You are sacrificing current rights that should be protected (including the patient's right to know their own medical details) for a vague and unproven future problem. The world is a big place, and it's unlikely that left-handedness, for example, is going to get bred out of the entire world's population, but even if it is, that would not justify inserting government/medical paternalism and control into what should be a private and personal decision.

What hasn't been mentioned here is that the women most likely to be seeking a sex-selective abortion are those who may also, with cause, be afraid for their own safety or that of their potential daughter if they have her. What if she'll be beaten or killed if she has a daughter? What if her daughter would be abused or neglected if she was born?

The answer is not to take the shortcut of denying rights, but to do the long slow work of education and change.
posted by emjaybee at 12:53 PM on January 18 [16 favorites]

...could or would [the government] consider fast tracking immigration visa applications from qualified female applicants?

As a non-expert, I imagine that this would cause an immediate Charter challenge.
posted by bonehead at 12:53 PM on January 18

This is not entirely a vague and unproven future issue. Prenatal tests mean that fetuses with Down's syndrome are commonly aborted. I see abortion based on other criteria as an entirely plausible outcome of technology combined with individual preferences.
posted by Wemmick at 12:59 PM on January 18 [1 favorite]

Just had a baby in Ontario so I can give a recent experience:

We had a third ultrasound because something wasn't clear on the first two so our doctor made the requisition. I'm not sure if there was an actual reason or if the thing that wasn't clear was the gender of our baby and our doctor knew my wife wanted to know.

I didn't want to know and wasn't present for the third ultrasound but apparently the tech told my wife the gender. I was present for the second ultrasound and I mentioned beforehand to the tech that I didn't want to know but my wife did so that she wouldn't tell me by accident (I also didn't look at the monitor in case I accidentally saw something).

The ultrasounds were done in a clinic, not a hospital, which may have made a difference with regards to disclosure, but it was covered by OHIP (the provincial health plan) so I don't see why it would. At no point were we given any indication, either at the clinic or doctor's office, that the gender would be kept from us or that we couldn't ask about it.
posted by any portmanteau in a storm at 1:04 PM on January 18

There are clinics in many cities in Canada offering sex selection "services". They don't specify pre or post conception. They have been operating since the early nineties at least. This is happening right now.
posted by bonehead at 1:07 PM on January 18

This needs a signal boost, and oh I wish I could add a blink tag...
emjaybee:
The answer is not to take the shortcut of denying rights, but to do the long slow work of education and change.

posted by Theta States at 1:08 PM on January 18 [4 favorites]

(choosing names, clothes, or whatever else might be colored by gender)

While possibly nice to have, those aren't really morally good reasons to disclose.

One doesn't need a(nother) moral reason in order to tell a woman what's growing inside her body. Withholding information because some person somewhere might act in a bad way is not ethically defensible.
posted by coolguymichael at 1:20 PM on January 18 [2 favorites]

Definitely in Ontario the standard of care is to disclose gender at the 18-20 wk ultrasound, known as the anatomy ultrasound. Whether this is done by the ultrasound tech or the radiologist varies based on clinic or hospital policy. I am highly surprised that other places in Canada might routinely deny this information to the patient. Can people in this thread - like the poster from Vancouver - really confirm that this is a recent policy in their experience?

There might be a difference between being unable to confirm the sex if the tech or radiologist simply can't see the genitals well enough and actually keeping this information secret on purpose.
posted by thelaze at 1:26 PM on January 18 [1 favorite]

This sure does make me want to stab myself in the brain. I find it difficult to object to this 30-week policy, but of course technology will ensure that it won't work for long. And of course there's no way to regulate this one kind of abortion away, once it gets to the point where somebody wants an abortion, without impinging upon the rights of all other women except to ask patients "are you doing this because you or somebody in your family doesn't want a girl" (or, say, a non-heterosexual child, to borrow an example from the future) and hoping they're honest. You can hardly tell a patient, "You're lying, we know why you really want an abortion, so you have to stay pregnant and have a baby you don't want. Stay healthy!" I mean, you can, obviously, but making women prove they deserve abortions is kind of a nightmare scenario.

It seems to me that women who would choose this path themselves have more or less been driven insane -- there's culturally-induced self-loathing and cognitive dissonance and then there's culturally-induced Females Are a Luxury Item -- but the cultural and familial pressures that made her so are not going to stop compressing her when she gives birth to a girl.

Much as the best way to limit non-selective abortions is to make sure people know what they're doing, have access to birth control, and feel that they have solid emotional reasons to say no to unsafe sex, the only way to change this symptom is to change the worldview that makes girls unwelcome. I mean, making sure that girls get to be born into families that would prefer to abort girls isn't doing the girls much of a favor. Who's gonna love them? The Canadian government? Maybe I object to the 30-week policy after all.
posted by Adventurer at 1:33 PM on January 18 [2 favorites]

I don't think selective abortion is good, but just because something is bad doesn't mean There Oughtta Be A Law.
posted by Holy Zarquon's Singing Fish at 1:34 PM on January 18 [3 favorites]

Do we maybe need some education to change the worldview that makes folks with down syndrome unwelcome?
posted by Kabanos at 2:01 PM on January 18

A number of clinics in the US also offer gender selection via preimplantation genetic screening prior to an IVF procedure (for "family balancing purposes").
posted by sevenyearlurk at 2:04 PM on January 18

Another vote on the side of yeah-thats-a-crappy-reason-to-have-an-abortion-but-it-aint-my-uterus-and-not-my-decision. Who's keeping track?
posted by LordSludge at 2:19 PM on January 18

We were asked if we wanted to know the sex of the fetus while there was a giant XX superimposed on the screen grab of the genitals. I thought that was a bit amusing.

Everyone, from the doctors to the nurses to the technicians, has been calling her a "baby" and not a fetus though, for what that's worth. We're in Canada.
posted by ODiV at 2:22 PM on January 18

Can people in this thread - like the poster from Vancouver - really confirm that this is a recent policy in their experience?

I'm from Vancouver and I can confirm that whenever people are faced with a horribly long wait time for an elective procedure or just want something DONE NOW, or want something outside the Canadian medical system for whatever reason, they go on a day trip to Bellingham. The number of medical clinics in Bellingham/Whatcom County is grossly disproportionate to the local American population of Whatcom and Skagit counties.
posted by thewalrus at 2:23 PM on January 18

So, you're cool with gendercide?

Y do you ask?
posted by biffa at 2:29 PM on January 18

I understand that across an entire society the sex ratio can be important

If the statistics cited above are correct gender ratios aren't taking too big a hit, as the skewing is happening after the birth of one or more girls and seems likely to stop as soon as a male heir is produced. This isn't like the situation in China where you end up with a generation of only males.
posted by Tell Me No Lies at 2:32 PM on January 18

So, you're cool with gendercide?

Y do you ask?

Nice one. :-)
posted by Tell Me No Lies at 2:34 PM on January 18

Do we maybe need some education to change the worldview that makes folks with down syndrome unwelcome?

What else can you do? If you eliminate "forcing women to be incubators for fetuses they don't want" as an option, there's not much left. Let's extend this to potentially gay children: if a woman wants to abort for this reason, is it really safe and ethical to force her to stay pregnant and then leave that child she wanted to abort in her care for 18 years? The state really ought to seize custody if it's basically charging a woman with intent to contribute to a kind of genocide and imprisoning her in a pregnant body for the remaining months of her term. The only way to not force children to be born into families that have an unusually good chance of being loveless and abusive is to force women to carry children to term and then give them up, like brood mares. There isn't a good legal solution when you get to this point.
posted by Adventurer at 2:57 PM on January 18 [1 favorite]

Do we maybe need some education to change the worldview that makes folks with down syndrome unwelcome?


I don't think parents who don't wish to give birth to a child with a genetic disorder and it's attendant problems need to be re-educated.
posted by werkzeuger at 2:57 PM on January 18 [1 favorite]

This will correct itself in a few generations. When a culture has nothing left but horny 20-year-old males, daughters will suddenly provide more potential monetary value than the sons, and parents will be aborting the males, not the other way around. It's already starting to happen in China.
posted by Melismata at 3:23 PM on January 18

It was the law here in Korea for many years, and may still be, for all I know.

There was a lot of sex-selective abortion here in the 80s and 90s and although attitudes are, as with much else, slowly changing, they haven't changed all that much, and with the added pressure that one child families are the norm now (Korea has the lowest birth rate in the OECD), a male child, who will perform the vitally important ceremony to pay respect to his ancestors twice a year (along with a host of other cultural and historical justifications) is still strongly preferred. I've read some mindboggling stats about abortion here in Korea in the past, shocking even for a committed pro-choice person like me, but I can't cite, so I won't bother repeating them.

The male/female ration in elementary, middle, and edging up into high schools nonetheless remains somewhere north of 110/100, last I heard.

I find it execrable, but that's just me.
posted by stavrosthewonderchicken at 3:51 PM on January 18

Can people in this thread - like the poster from Vancouver - really confirm that this is a recent policy in their experience?

I gave birth in Vancouver, but had my ultrasounds in Ontario. In Ontario they identified the sex on request. A couple years later a (white) Vancouver friend was pregnant and in order to find out the sex of her son, the doctor (technician? I can't remember which) had to note in her file that they were revealing the sex of the fetus due to "maternal distress." Without a compelling reason, they weren't allowed to say. A different (Bangladeshi) friend was not told the sex of her youngest (he'd be 11 now) and was told explicitly that it was to prevent sex selective abortion. Sex selection is totally not a part of Bangladeshi culture and the accusation was, naturally, deeply offensive.

I can remember this being a story at least ten years ago as a whole host of ultrasound places opened up in Bellingham, WA to serve the demand for early ultrasounds.
posted by looli at 4:09 PM on January 18

Aren't there sex-linked genetic disorders that people need to know about early? I think the best thing is to disclose if the parents want but to make it clear that it's not 100% accurate.
posted by BrotherCaine at 4:41 PM on January 18

So, you're cool with gendercide?

Is aborting a female fetus because it is female gendercide any more than aborting a fetus because it is a fetus is genocide?

In any event, we can't hijack women's bodies to pursue a egalitarian society any more than we can hijack them to pursue a patriarchal one. Personally, I'm not "cool" with gendercide, and I can rather emptily promise that I won't use my nonexistent uterus to perpetrate any sort of -cide whatsoever, but what people do with their own (perhaps more existent) uteruses will have to be left up to them.
posted by planet at 4:52 PM on January 18 [2 favorites]

On a related subject (amnio and the choices after a "not happy" result), I highly recommend Testing Women, Testing the Fetus: The Social Impact of Amniocentesis in America. It was recommended here on metafilter in one of those crazy Sarah Palin-baby threads oh so long ago.
It's a bit out of date, but a fascinating examination of different segments of society [culturally and economically], how they react to "bad" results, the support they receive and the knowledge they have/are given before making the decision to abort/not abort a wanted pregnancy. I found it fascinating-because, for better or worse this technology has given women, and families, the ability to change the future demographics of our country (it's about the US) and those decisions aren't made int he same ways in each of those cultural and economically diverse communities.
Good read.
posted by atomicstone at 5:33 PM on January 18

Though the sex ratio for first births among first generation South and East Asian immigrants to Canada is only slightly higher than the norm at about 1.08, the ratios become increasingly skewed for each subsequent birth where all previous children are female.

Better that they birth a child they want, than one they don't. Not only is it their right to make their choice, but who wouldn't be gunning for a change in gender after the nth female? Seeing as the first birth ratio is only slightly raised, social marketing and education would help keep the ratio from rising. Draconian and largely unenforceable laws are a poor choice by comparison.
posted by davidpriest.ca at 6:00 PM on January 18

who wouldn't be gunning for a change in gender after the nth female?

I know there's some facetiousness in this, but gotta say, my hand's up over here. Likewise for the nth male. Getting pregnant and taking it far enough along so you can get an amnio and then aborting so you can get pregnant again with a different kind of healthy fetus isn't like dumping out the bathwater and filling it up again. It's kind of a heavy experience anyway, pregnancy plus abortion, but if you actually want a kid? Those hormones are not friendly hormones. So terrible for those women who are getting pressured into abortions they wouldn't have chosen on their own.
posted by Adventurer at 6:43 PM on January 18 [2 favorites]

"In any event, we can't hijack women's bodies to pursue a egalitarian society any more than we can hijack them to pursue a patriarchal one."

I think we can however, in good conscience, prevent medical infrastructure from being used to aid a horrifically regressive and destructive practice.

I self identify as pro-choice, believe in the right of women to have access to both effective birth control and abortion until the viability of the fetus, and have happily supported friends as they exercise their reproductive rights. However, I cannot ignore the fact that abortion is still an act morally distinct from a tonsil removal and to pretend otherwise is an absurdity that conservatives rightly call us on. Are any of you really not more uncomfortable with sex selective abortions than IVF centers picking eggs fertilized with Y carrying sperm?

I grew up with a gaggle of Babushkas as neighbors who each escaped from the Soviet Union and were each, I'm sure, a lot younger than they looked. Between the four of them they had managed to have over 23 abortions because of a combination of the absurd lack of birth control, the endemic rape and sexual coercion, and the complete impracticability of children in wed-lock much less out of it. They saw the procedure as meaningfully distinct from a tonsillectomy. There absolutely is tragedy in the idea that there is nothing human about a fetus, especially once reduced to absurdity. While we cannot morally force women to carry unwanted pregnancies, we can absolutely change the contexts in which reproductive decisions are made by ensuring that effective birth control is universally available, communicating openly about sex and consent, requiring an accessible judicial bypass for unwantedly expectant minors, providing meaningful institutional support to single mothers as well as mothers in general, and not allowing medical infrastructure to be used to determine sex in countries where sex selective abortions are a probable result of that use. I don't know that there is a strong case that Canada is such a country, but assuming there was one I would absolutely support this.

The idea that there could not possibly be a bad or immoral context for an abortion is ultimately a helpful fiction that we really don't need to follow to this kind of absurd conclusion. Yes it is wrong deny someone the right to end a pregnancy they do not want, yes it is wrong to carry a human-creature/human-like-entity for 20 weeks hoping for a child only to kill it solely because of its sex (How the fuck could anyone tell the gender of a fetus anyway?), and yes it is wrong to use medical infrastructure for a purpose that has aiding the sex selective aspect of an abortion as its only medical consequence.
posted by Blasdelb at 7:50 PM on January 18 [1 favorite]

"who wouldn't be gunning for a change in gender after the nth female?"

You mean girl right? With any other topic on this site that would have been called out a long time ago. I think you meant girl, or at least female fetus. The word female used as a noun is an awfully strong dog-whistle for awfully terrible ideas.

But really, have voices like St. Alia's been so silenced in these threads that all we are left with is this race to out-liberal each other that sprints to these kinds of inhuman conclusions? I would never have expected active support for gendercide on MetaFilter.
posted by Blasdelb at 8:00 PM on January 18

I would never have expected active support for gendercide on MetaFilter.

FYI, your continuing use of that term is placing you in the role of the person who brings the word "genocide" to a general abortion discussion. Such people are considered extremists and generally other people tune them out entirely.

Unless that is your intent, you may wish to come up with a less loaded word to get your point across.
posted by Tell Me No Lies at 8:33 PM on January 18 [2 favorites]

I don't think anybody supports it, and I do think it's appropriate to raise the spectre of genocide here. But there's no way to determine whether anybody is telling the truth about why they're having an abortion and then codify that without seriously legally screwing all existing women. And what I've been seeing here regarding the proposal itself is primarily doubt that it will be useful for long. They're already selling paternity tests in drugstores, you know? It's deeply depressing but I don't see any possible fix but activisim and education, whatever forms those might take. (Not too crazy about the "eventually girls will be more valuable than boys" take -- bad things happen when girls become super-valuable specifically for their sexual and reproductive capabilities, i.e. as chattel and livestock.)

And again, finally, even if we can somehow prove that an abortion is for the purposes of gender selection and then (argh) force the mother to give birth and remain healthy, but then fail to take those state-enforced children away from those same families and re-home them, we're putting a whole lot of girls in a position to grow up unloved and abused and end up getting this kind of abortion themselves. Much like those social conservatives who want to outlaw abortion and then do nothing for the resulting child. It wouldn't exactly be helping. And I don't know about you but I don't have the stomach for forcing someone to carry a child they aren't even able to raise. Honestly, this is an argument for allowing these unfit potential parents to just go ahead and find out: what happens to girls who are born to people who really, really didn't want a girl? Sometimes they disappear anyway.

I would love to hear what might be done before anybody gets pregnant.
posted by Adventurer at 9:33 PM on January 18

I would rather there be selective abortion than baby girls being abandoned or killed after birth. I don't see how preventing women from finding out the sex of their baby pre-birth is going to do anything to deter sex selection. Families that "need" boys will get them, one way or another.
posted by Phire at 7:28 AM on January 19

This reminds me of attempting to ban religious face coverings and prohibiting the sale of alcohol to pregnant women. I don't have solutions for the underlying problems, but I don't know that the proposed solutions don't cause more problems in the end (eg: unsafe abortions, solvent abuse).
posted by ODiV at 7:31 AM on January 19

I think we can however, in good conscience, prevent medical infrastructure from being used to aid a horrifically regressive and destructive practice.

The abortion itself is entirely legal. Being free to secure entirely legal services means that you can do so for good reasons, neutral reasons, incorrect reasons, morally bad reasons, or even horrifically regressive and destructive reasons.

I can't quite figure out whether this is about abortion or information. Let's say it's about abortion. I get that you're not directly advocating forcing women to carry and give birth. Except... Your proposal seems to be to deny information that might result in sex-selective abortions. But that only makes sense to do if there are women out there who would consent to carry and give birth to a boy, but not a girl. Your plan is to deny these women the information they need to determine their own consent, in effect forcing half of them to endure pregnancy and childbirth against their ex-post wishes.

If you look at it as being about the information itself, it's even worse. Women and the freedom of women are so important that we must deny women the capacity to make effective decisions about their own bodies in order to protect them.
posted by ROU_Xenophobe at 8:18 AM on January 19

I do think it's appropriate to raise the spectre of genocide here

Okay, this is a phenomenon confined to a relatively small subset of a couple of ethnic groups. This isn't the death camps. It bothers me seeing "genocide" tossed around here so loosely.

People routinely abort fetuses with Down's syndrome and other disabilities. Are they committing genocide? If not, why not? Should we refuse to tell parents about non-life-threatening developmental problems with their fetuses? If not, why not? I don't see the difference - sex and disability are both protected grounds. In both cases the abortions are for the benefit of the parents' lifestyle rather than for the health of the mother.

Women have the right to abortions in Canada, and that right becomes seriously circumscribed if we get to start telling them what reasons are good enough.
posted by Dasein at 8:49 AM on January 19

"If you look at it as being about the information itself, it's even worse. Women and the freedom of women are so important that we must deny women the capacity to make effective decisions about their own bodies in order to protect them."

Effective is an odd, and pretty disturbingly clinical, adjective to use in describing the nature of such an abortion. I'll happily worry more about the effectiveness of using medical technology to discover and disclose the sex of a fetus so that girls can be systematically aborted, if that is a probable result, than the ex-post variety of wishes.

"This reminds me of attempting to ban religious face coverings and prohibiting the sale of alcohol to pregnant women. I don't have solutions for the underlying problems, but I don't know that the proposed solutions don't cause more problems in the end (eg: unsafe abortions, solvent abuse)."

I fail to see how neglecting to either detect or disclose the sex of a fetus would lead to unsafe abortions in a country where abortions are safe, legal, and accessible.
posted by Blasdelb at 9:01 AM on January 19

Yeah, I guess that doesn't follow; you're right. I was assuming that intentionally keeping information from a woman about her pregnancy that could affect her willingness to carry the fetus to term and also creating (reinforcing?) the implication that a woman will be judged by her health care providers about her personal reasons for termination would drive some women to unsafe abortions. Without any sort of data that's quite a stretch though, so it was irresponsible of me to make the assumption.
posted by ODiV at 9:20 AM on January 19

Recursive morality is extra confusing.
posted by Blasdelb at 9:40 AM on January 19

Effective is an odd, and pretty disturbingly clinical, adjective to use in describing the nature of such an abortion.

An effective choice is one you can actually bring into effect, instead of choosing but being prevented from doing so.

This is about preventing women from controlling their own bodies by denying them the information that they need to make informed choices.
posted by ROU_Xenophobe at 9:48 AM on January 19 [1 favorite]

"This is about preventing women from controlling their own bodies by denying them the information that they need to make informed choices."

If you really think about that platitude, there is a point for most everybody at which it breaks down and ceases to have moral power. Refusing to produce and distribute medical information whose only possible medical purpose is to discard otherwise wanted pregnancies because of something so superficial as sex seems like as good a point as any. As a society we routinely deny people information because that information could only distort the decisions they make.

"Women have the right to abortions in Canada, and that right becomes seriously circumscribed if we get to start telling them what reasons are good enough."

My understanding is that Canadians, like Americans, arn't really pro-choice, or pro-life, so much as deeply conflicted; surveys easily produce dramatic results for either side depending on logically meaningless quirks of how the question is asked. I suspect that policy based on a fanatical devotion to dogma would place the legality and accessibility of abortions in a lot more danger than mixing in a little humanity.
posted by Blasdelb at 10:37 AM on January 19

That doesn't really respond to my point. You think that a "little humanity" means preventing abortions based on sex. Someone else thinks it means preventing abortions based on disability. Why is one self-evidently more persuasive than the other?
posted by Dasein at 12:08 PM on January 19

Case in point.
posted by Dasein at 12:21 PM on January 19

Systematically aborting fetuses of a certain gender, or disability, or other genotype can only be genocide as we understand the concept if abortion constitutes the killing of a human being. And if abortion constitutes the killing of a human being, the question of which kinds of humans it's being done to rather pales in comparison.
posted by Holy Zarquon's Singing Fish at 12:30 PM on January 19 [1 favorite]

can only be genocide as we understand the concept if abortion constitutes the killing of a human being

Yes, exactly. If selectively aborting female-to-be fetuses is gendercide than you're accepting the religious argument that abortion itself is genocide, in which case all abortion must be outlawed. A fetus is either a person or it isn't, it can't only be a person if the women bearing the fetus is considering having an abortion for the wrong reasons.
posted by Justinian at 12:59 PM on January 19 [1 favorite]

Boys die more often from childhood diseases and death-by-misadventure. So it all evens out by adulthood, right?
posted by clvrmnky at 2:53 PM on January 19

Systematically aborting fetuses of a certain gender, or disability, or other genotype can only be genocide as we understand the concept if abortion constitutes the killing of a human being.

I don't think it's inappropriate to consider it in comparison with genocide. But I would say the same thing about an operation that somehow renders women incapable of giving birth to girls, well before any cells start dividing. I was thinking about genocide not as an act but as a plan, as an attempt to ensure that a certain group ceases or nearly ceases to be. Obviously even this is not the plan here, since everybody concerned wants somebody to give birth to some girls, lest their boys have nobody to marry. They just don't want to do it themselves.

So this phenomenon can really only go so far as to make what should be half the population an artificially-reduced minority, which is probably not going to be as empowering for the members of that minority as some people suggest. Genocide is maybe not the term to invoke, but there doesn't seem to be a word for deliberately pursuing a path that if pursued by everyone would result in a particular group's extinction.
posted by Adventurer at 4:37 PM on January 19

... and which, I should add, is motivated by the belief that the group to be prevented is undesirable/worthless compared to the group in power. I suppose "eugenics" is what I meant to invoke.

So how does this view square with not bringing up extinction, etc. when it comes to fetuses that appear to have disabilities (especially given that people with disabilities, not women, were historically targeted by eugenicists)? I can only say that my distaste for sex-selective abortions is because it is unmistakably -- when it happens across a culture, rather than in isolation -- a manifestation of a cultural contempt for and devaluation of women as a class. There is also an economic argument, but it seems more crass to me (although this is to some extent a cultural issue) than simply considering how much a child will cost the family: specifically, will this child, when it's old enough, be valuable to the family? And that economic value is itself culturally and prejudicially determined.

Whereas when it comes to genetic disorders I am personally better able to imagine prospective parents wondering: how much would having this child cost (and people frequently abort healthy fetuses because they can't afford to have a baby or another baby), what would this kid's life be like, would I be taking care of this child for the rest of my life. I'm sure I could use some serious education in this area and am evincing some unexamined prejudices here. But -- with the caveat that I don't want to use the law to force anybody to have a child they don't want and will mistreat, this is only hand-wringing -- for the average person who has to feed and raise a child and cover its health care, the disadvantages of having a child of a particular gender or sexual orientation or ethnicity seem to me to stem exclusively from prejudice, whether theirs or others'. Whereas it is not at all unreasonable to assume that there will be objective costs and sacrifices, independent of prejudice, associated with being personally and financially responsible for a child who will need extra care and who may, if at the unlucky end of the spectrum, need a great deal of extra care to have a good life. I understand that the average life expectancy for people with Down syndrome in particular is 60 now, up from 12 (!) in 1949, but more than 40 percent have to deal with heart defects, too, among other medical issues. I'm not saying "these are good [or bad] reasons to have an abortion," I'm saying "these are very different reasons to have an abortion."

Prejudice against the visibly disabled is more intense and widespread, I think, than against women and most minority groups. But it seems to me that even when the prejudice that makes people think "I couldn't love a child who turns out to be ___" has been educated away, there are still going to be a fair number of prospective parents who feel that they personally may not be able to handle what a child with a genetic disorder may require of them. Am I judging women's reasons for having abortions and finding some of them more reasonable than others? I sure am. And I desperately want the cultural issues that produce some of that reasoning to disappear, which is why this particularly vivid and evocative manifestation of them is so upsetting. But I'm also not in favor of anyone being allowed to forbid anybody to abort because her reasons are hateful.
posted by Adventurer at 6:17 PM on January 19 [1 favorite]

The technologies for determining any number of genetic markers — sex, chromosomal diseases and dysfunctions, painful disorders that reveal themselves well past childhood, etc — will inevitably be so inexpensive as to effectively make them available to all. At which point women will be fully informed and — because they possess ultimate control of their bodies — capable of choosing to terminate. Which they do, even where it is illegal and unsafe, and at shockingly high rates.

Attempting to suppress information is obviously not anything like a solution, so quit offering it as one. It's the exact opposite of a solution, given the real-world evidence of its actual outcomes!
posted by davidpriest.ca at 11:54 AM on January 22