Posted on 12/21/2011 9:16:21 AM PST by Morgana
YEREVAN, ARMENIA, December 20, 2011 (LifeSiteNews.com) - The practice of sex-selective abortion has become so deeply ingrained in the former Soviet republic of Armenia - where the median number of abortions obtained by women over 40 is a staggering eight - that the nation will soon face “a deficit of women,” according to a United Nations health official.
A new report produced by the United Nations Population Fund, the Armenian ministry of health, and the Institute of Perinatology found that 7,000 Armenian women - or 0.8 percent of all Armenian women of child-bearing age - had elected to have sex-selective abortions since 2006. Armenia has the world’s second worst ratio of boys-to-girls in the world, second only to China, according to a World Economic Forum report. The average nation has a ratio of 106 boys to 100 girls; Armenia’s average is 112 to 100.
The study, “Prevalence and Reasons of Sex-Selective Abortions in Armenia,” estimated a loss of 1,400 future mothers. UNFPA Armenia Assistant Representative Garik Hayrapetyan told reporters Monday, “In ten to 20 years,” he said,” we will face a deficit of women.”
He was surprised to learn that “highly educated women” with a comfortable salary were the most likely to choose to abort unborn female children.
Dr. Vigen Guroian, professor of Religious Studies at the University of Virginia told LifeSiteNews.com, “I cannot understand why the Armenian people are committing genocide against themselves now, when they’ve endured it.” During the Armenian genocide (1915-1923), 1.5 million of the Ottoman Empire’s 2 million Armenian Christians were exterminated by Muslim Turks.
“What’s even more sad is that the news comes out at this time of the year, at Advent and at the time of the birth of the Lord,” he said.
“If the Virgin Mary had been in Armenia at this time, she probably would have been encouraged to have an abortion.”
Dr. Guroian, who is of Armenian descent, said the debate became personal for him after the birth of his granddaughter five months ago, when he realized she may never have been born in her family’s homeland.
The Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe, (PACE) passed a resolution in October stating that aborting unborn girls “reinforces a climate of violence against women,” and the coercion young mothers undergo constitutes “a form of psychological violence.” It particularly highlighted Armenia’s situation. However, the resolution deemed the practice “justified for the prevention of serious sex-linked genetic diseases.” Its author, Doris Stump, instructed, “We should be careful, however, not to use prenatal sex selection as a pretext to limit legal abortion.”
Armenia’s abortion rate, although lower than it was in the 1990s and only one-third the rate of the 1980s, remains staggeringly high. The median number of abortions for women over 40 is eight, and some women have as many as 20 abortions in a lifetime.
Experts attribute this to the lingering influence of the Soviet Union, when abortion became the nation’s primary means of birth control. Similar rates persist in the former Soviet republics of Georgia and Azerbaijan. “This is now a deeply culturally set pattern. I don’t think the church could solve the problem tomorrow by speaking up,” Dr. Guroian said.
“I’ve voiced my anguish at the church’s reticence to address this in the past,” he said. “Perhaps it had an excuse during the period of Soviet rule, but it’s had no excuse for the past 20 years.”
A spokesperson for the Western Diocese of the Armenian Apostolic Church of North America declined to comment on this story. Representatives from the Eastern Diocese were not immediately available by deadline.
However, some voices within Armenia have articulated the Christian Church’s opposition to abortion. Fr. Kyuregh Talyan, a parish priest in the Kotayk Diocese, held a press conference last month to say, “A human being begins life from the moment of conception. To me, an emotionless concept like ‘artificial termination of pregnancy’ is nothing more than homicide.” Its widespread tolerance “comes from a new religion prevailing in Europe - the religion of ‘human rights.’”
The conscious decision to abort unborn girls now pervades the globe. The British medical journal The Lancet estimated some 12 million sex-selection abortions had taken place in India from 1980 to 2010. The shortage of women has become so acute it has led to “wife-sharing.” A study of the sex imbalance in India, China, and South Korea links the absence of potential wives to increased aggression, violence, and criminal behavior among men. The Parental Non-Discrimination Act aims to end the practice in the United States.
Armenian legislators have proposed a law forbidding doctors from disclosing the child’s sex until after the cut-off time when abortions are forbidden under law. Like much of Europe, Armenia restricts abortions to the first 12 weeks of pregnancy. However, many later abortions take place, often chemical abortions induced at home without a doctor’s supervision.
Yet some within Armenia emphasize the real danger is not “gendercide,” but abortion itself. The head of the Department of Gynecology at the Armenian-American Wellness Center, Dr. Marina Voskanyan, warned, “Women have to know that discontinuing any pregnancy…will lead to serious health issues. An abortion is a very negative phenomenon.”
Dr. Vahe Ter-Minasyan, an ob-gyn in Armenia, agreed: “To opt for an abortion is merely a question of ignorance. If women and their husbands knew how much damage an abortion causes to a woman’s health, they would never choose it.”
Glad I don’t live there...I don’t know what I would do without my only child....my DAUGHTER, who is the light of my life...
It's allah's will, doncha know?
I’ve got news for you, Armenia is a christian country. In fact they have in the past, proudly claimed to have been the first country to adopt Christianity.
*nevermind*
Yeah. I got stupid there for a moment.
I can only presume the author is misusing statistics. The notion that the average number of abortions had by ALL women over 40 is anywhere eight seems impossible. William Robert Johnston assembles abortion statistics from every nation he can.
http://www.johnstonsarchive.net/policy/abortion/ab-armenia.html
His data show between 9,000 and 30,000 abortions per year, accounting for, in 2009, 23% of all pregnancies. So unless women are having 40 children each, there is a data conflict here. And while Johnston’s sources are hardly infallible (typically government or intergovernment sources), I’m forced to believe that the reality is closer to Johnsons’.
My guess is somewhere, someone, somewhere lost some critical qualifiers.
Albania may be culturally or historically connected to Islam, but it was a strict Communist state for several generations. The abortion rate - mainly “off the books” - there is quite high, although lower than most of Europe and Central Asia.
In many annual surveys, Albania is the only European country with a replacement-level birthrate ... and keep in mind that this includes the Moslem populations of other European countries! If Spain’s (or Italy’s, or Germany’s, or Sweden’s) Moslems have an above-replacement birthrate, how low must be the birthrate of the ethnic Spanish (etc.) population, in order to have an aggregate of 1.3 to 1.6 per family.
These women spend more time in the stirrups than a cowboy.
I’m shocked too. I’ve long known of the prevalence of abortion in the Soviet days, I’ve also known quite a few women from the former USSR, especially in the nineties. Dad and I put up a few of them who were visiting, studying, working here, etc. for a few weeks or months. Friends of friends of his Russian/Kalmyk diaspora crowd. Dad ceased the practice as he grew to despise them. I know I’m pandering to stereotypes here but the general image of Soviet-raised women as cold-blooded, selfish, grasping, dishonest, etc. had a hard core of reality.
I have been wondering for years how much the routine abortion culture of the Soviet and post-Soviet Russias has had to do with this. It is much more openly discussed nowadays, the psychological maiming effect that abortion has on women.
How much this has to do, vis a vis the general dehumanizing effect of communism had on creating those human lizards, I don’t know, but I sure as hell hope that abortion rates have gone down in the twenty years since the USSR fell.
Wow....
The Armenian girls I knew growing up were not the most, how should I say, “willing”, girls on the block.
I guess the “nice girls” came to the US.
Turks no longer needed for an Armenian genocide.
It makes sense to me only in that a female fetus is more likely to be conceived and be brought to term. Female fetus are just stronger, sorry guys. If a woman was to start bearing children in her 20’s, never use birth control, the odds are she will have more girls than boys.
So what is going on here is the women are getting pregnant with the stronger female embryo (or should I even say zygote?) and because their messed up society only wants boy children the female fetus are being snuffed out.
A real loss. Armenian women are very hot looking.
Since they are Christian, this is most puzzling.
That isn’t good. The less Muslims in the world, the better - particularly in Europe and the U.S.
I think Armenians have generally very strong family values and a strong sense of ethnic identity.
They’re beautiful. I remember two Armenian women I knew in school. One had ver pale white skin and smoldering dark eyes and dark hair. The other looked like of one those ladies in the picture, the one in the Middle. I was too shy to ask them out.
I really like Armenian people from the few contacts I have had with them. They seem like solid decent Christians. I especially hate the Turks for what they did to them, the Assyrian and Chaldean Christians and the Greeks although I have no ethnic connection to any of them.
lol. (I’ve mixed them up, too. I have also mixed up Milton Friedman with Morgan Friedman.)
Females are stronger, but more males are conceived and more males are born.
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