Letters to the Editor
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what happened to the "choice" part of "pro-choice?"
I find it hypocritical that so many people like Ms. Mieszkowski who believe that women's choice is limited to the right to choose to terminate a pregnancy, as opposed to carry one to term. How ridiculous it is for a person who allegedly believes that whether to have a child or not is a woman's "right," and yet gives the nod to the Chinese government's policy, which asserts that childbirth is a privilege accorded to women by a state. That state is run almost entirely by men who were raised in a society in which female fetuses are considered inferior. Why do they consider female fetuses inferior? Because they consider women inferior. How does this get a pass from American feminists? Because within the pro-choice movement is a movement that is actually "pro-abortion," in that they actually want more abortions, so long as the people having them are poor.
Either choice is a "right," or it is not. If the Chinese government has a right to order women to have abortions, the US government certainly has the right to tell them not to.
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Abhorrent?
"Yet it's not hard to imagine lots of unintended -- and miserable -- consequences from trying to squelch sex-selection abortion, as abhorrent as such a practice is."
So aborting a fetus because it is female is abhorrent, but it's less horrifying to abort it for any other reason? Whatever the reason or motivation, either way you end up with an innocent being destroyed for a non-life-threatening reason.
If a sleepwalking man picked up a machine gun and went running through the streets shooting people, it would be unfortunate but justified for the police to kill him if there was no other way to stop him. That is essentially what is happening if you abort a baby to save the life or health of the mother --- an innocent person must sadly be killed to prevent more people from being harmed. But if you're doing a sex-selected abortion or for ANY other reason, then it's pretty hypocritical to say it's bad to do it for one non-essential criteria but less bad to do it for another.
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Another day, another Chinese crackdown
Pete Sweeney, the crackdown on sex-selective abortion will cause more harm to women (and children) because it will go underground. The best solution is to provide social security so parents don't depend on sons to take care of them when they're old.
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They need you, Donna
Please go to China and develop an affordable social security system for over a billion people, that people can depend on 50 or more years into the future so firmly that it will make them give up the short-term gain of aborting a daughter.
I'm sure you can do it.
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The government can do it alone
They should also value girls and promote gay unions and marriage. It shouldn't be up to sons to care for their parents alone. If men and women shared household duties and men and women made the same amount of money they wouldn't sex-selectively abort. There will no longer be this problem.
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Feminists
Once again the feminists are for abortion (see first story), but only if used in a way that advances entitlements and benefits for women/girls.
It's time to reap what feminism has sown, Ms. Mieszkowski.
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Re: Sweeney
I find it hypocritical that so many people like Ms. Mieszkowski who believe that women's choice is limited to the right to choose to terminate a pregnancy, as opposed to carry one to term. How ridiculous it is for a person who allegedly believes that whether to have a child or not is a woman's "right," and yet gives the nod to the Chinese government's policy, which asserts that childbirth is a privilege accorded to women by a state.
Funny, my reading of Mieszkowski's post is that she's being critical of China's policies. What's wrong with your reading comprehension?
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And if the government just handed out unicorns
And gumdrops, then of course all their problems would vanish instantly! A unicorn in every rice paddy!
They will simply import women from elsewhere for wives.
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Seriously
She criticized the government policy of cracking down on sex-selective abortions because parents who don't want girls won't have girls.
My understanding of importing foreign women is that it's only available to well-off Asians but we're mostly talking about rural Chinese who are already poor. What will most likely happen is doubling up like they do in India, that is, two brothers will share a wife. Short-term solutions such as sex-selective abortion lead to this crisis. Long-term solutions are key to solving it. It may not be a problem after all because girls in rural areas are often not be reported because having more than one child is against the law. Therefore, this may not be a crisis at all. It creates attention-grabbing titles though.
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Sweeney
Sweeney: I find it hypocritical that so many people like Ms. Mieszkowski who believe that women's choice is limited to the right to choose to terminate a pregnancy, as opposed to carry one to term. How ridiculous it is for a person who allegedly believes that whether to have a child or not is a woman's "right," and yet gives the nod to the Chinese government's policy, which asserts that childbirth is a privilege accorded to women by a state.
Pyrian: Funny, my reading of Mieszkowski's post is that she's being critical of China's policies. What's wrong with your reading comprehension?
Actually, Mieszkowski did not "give a nod" to the one-child policy in either of her articles:
That's thanks to the combination of a cultural preference for boys, the country's one-child policy and sex-selection abortion, which add up to so many couples aborting female fetuses that there soon won't be enough women for men to marry.
She was very neutral about the one-child policy in both articles.
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Good Point
The best way to respond would be to raise the economic value of women to their families and societies.
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There's nothing wrong
with sex-selection abortion specifically.
What's wrong with it in China (and India) is that women are so devalued by the culture that *everyone* wants a boy.
In Japan, there's a saying -- "Ichi hime ni taro" -- "first a girl, then a boy." I think there's sexism in there too (have a girl first because she'll help you raise the boy), but at the very least, the Japanese believe strongly in sex balance, even though they are a very patriarchal culture. This is because Japanese women are not encouraged to abandon their parents and become solely part of their husband's family (it's in fact a Japanese tradition to give birth at the home of your own family.) In America, I strongly suspect that if a person could have only one child, they would divide pretty evenly on whether that one child was male or female... and if we were faced with the pressures of the Chinese or Indians (ie, we needed a child to care for us in our old age), we would all abort our *boys*. In America, it is overwhelmingly daughters that care for the elderly.
In China and India, it is daughters-in-*law*. And there's the problem. The incentives to produce a good that only benefits other people aren't there. (Technically the sons are the ones that care for the parents... but in fact it's the sons' wives who do the hands-on care.) So the pressure to have only sons is enormous. Sex-selective abortion is the most humane way to accomplish this goal -- better than female infanticide or abandonment of girl children. But unlike abortion in America, which creates no social ills (unless you consider abortion itself a social ill, which needless to say I don't), the selective abortion of female fetuses causes a social ill -- no girls for these boys to marry.
It's not about abortion. If the fathers could take a pill that would kill their XX sperm only, that would still generate the social ill, which is that combining extreme sexism, social incentives not to raise girls, and modern pressure to have few children, is going to turn these societies into a lawless pressure cooker and breeding ground for crime and terrorism. Young men with no hope of the love of a woman end up doing nasty things.
They could solve this with social security, financial support for the parents of girls, combating cultural attitudes, or even polyandry. Instead they're cracking down on the abortions. That's not going to work for the same reason cracking down on abortion never works... it's just going to end up with an even greater sex imbalance because women will die of underground abortions, baby girls will be put out with the trash, and young girls will be abused and neglected. The sex imabalance issue won't be redressed without positive reinforcement for the behavior of raising daughters; you can't make people raise children they don't want and get a good outcome, but you can fairly easily change what kind of children they want. Give families a hefty tax break or payout from the government for bearing daughters, none for sons, and I guarantee the problem will go away.