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Choosing to eliminate unwanted daughters
Jewish World Review ^ | April 7, 2008 | Jeff Jacoby

Posted on 04/07/2008 7:53:36 AM PDT by rhema

The unfettered "right to choose" is a progressive value, we are instructed by the abortion lobby — one indispensable to the empowerment of women. But a new study in PNAS (the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences) prompts an awkward question: How exactly are American women empowered when abortion is deployed to prevent the existence of American girls?

Population experts have documented for years the use of abortion for sex selection in regions of the world where sons are more highly prized than daughters. . . .

The natural sex ratio at birth is slightly male-biased at roughly 1.05-to-1, meaning that about 105 boys are born for every 100 girls. But in China the current ratio at birth is about 120 boys per 100 girls — and in more prosperous parts of the country, such as Guangdong and Hainan, the imbalance has reached an even more lopsided 135-to-100.

In India, census data from 2001 show that among children younger than 6, there are just 927 girls per 1,000 boys. There too, the greater the prosperity, the greater the discrepancy: In the high-income state of Punjab, notes Joseph D'Agostino of the Population Research Institute, there are only 793 girls for every 1,000 boys. He cites a report by UNICEF, which calculates that "7,000 fewer girls are now born in India each day than nature would dictate, and 10 million have been killed during pregnancy or just after in the past 20 years."

< snip >

Most Americans rightly regard sex-selective abortions as odious; in a 2006 Zogby poll, an overwhelming 86 percent of Americans agreed that such abortions should be illegal. But they're not illegal — and as economists Douglas Almond and Lena Edlund indicate in the latest issue of PNAS, they are now occurring in the United States, too.

(Excerpt) Read more at jewishworldreview.com ...


TOPICS: Culture/Society; Editorial
KEYWORDS: abortion; prolife
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To: rhema
For what kind of feminist would it be who could contemplate the use of abortion to eliminate ever-greater numbers of girls, and not cry out in horror?

You know that answer, rhema: the kind of soulless NOW/NARAL harpies who affirm every abortion, no matter that minority and female babies are disproportionately exterminated.

21 posted on 04/07/2008 3:04:28 PM PDT by Caleb1411 ("These are the days when the Christian is expected to praise every creed except his own." G. K. C)
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To: SeminoleSoldier

The tossed coin has no memory. A FAIR coin will come up heads 50/50 no matter how many heads have already come up in a row.

Likewise, a woman’s body will not give the Y sperm an advantage because X sperm have won the race in the past.

If a couple had had ten girls in a row, I would bet on them having another, because that run of girls may indicate a physiological condition favoring the conception or successful pregnancy of a girl.

Two girls in a row isn’t enough to give any weight to that hypothesis, but it does suggest that don’t have a condition strongly favoring a boy. I’d still bet on the boy though with an odds ratio of 1.05/1.


22 posted on 04/07/2008 4:17:33 PM PDT by heartwood
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To: SeminoleSoldier

actually I think that the odds of having the same gender is higher the second time around. something to do with the pH of the whole thing.


23 posted on 04/07/2008 7:55:01 PM PDT by Mercat (I am! I stand at the door and knock.)
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