"As techniques for genetic screening improve many foetuses with what parents regard as undesirable traits will be aborted". I hope steven1meyer's prediction doesn't come true. At the moment, I can not think of any situation where social engineering is acceptable. We forget that bringing a life into this world is a singular occurance. In other words, IT can not be re-produced.

Haralambos writes:

"Sex-selective abortion should be criminalized, whilst still protecting women's rights."

It is not at all clear how you would do this. A woman says "I want an abortion." She does not have to give a reason. It may be because the foetus is of the "wrong" sex or it may be because she does not want a baby for now. How can you tell?

IN a practical sense, how would you achieve your goal of criminalising sex-selective abortion while protecting a woman's right to have an abortion Haralambos?

Note that we already abort foetuses with undesirable traits such as Down's syndrome, Klinefelter's syndrome and Tay Sachs disease. That's the limit of what our genetic screening can do for now.

But if we get to the point where we can detect a tendency towards mental dimness or homosexuality in utero do you really think you could stop parents aborting?

I think this is something we're going to have to learn to live with. Either that or restrict abortions.

Spot on Steven

I wrote something on this recently for uni actually.. in the course of researching it, I came across a product called "Pink or Blue".. which is a commercially available test which can be bought over the internet and accurately determines the sex of the fetus at 7 weeks gestation.

So the technology is already there and steven is 100% correct, while I (although I note not everyone on this thread) find the idea of sex-selective termination morally repugnant, the reality of the ready availability of termination is that it doesn't really matter what the reason is, as no "reason" is needed. The choice need not be justified.

While I find the laissez faire/uber libertarian (as long as you don't happen to be a fetus that is!) attitude of some posters here quite offensive, at least they are consistent I suppose. On that point, I suspect that wider society would not concur and would draw the line at terminating "wrong" sex fetuses.

The woman's right to choose is absolute at present

I can imagine that women in these countries want to rescue their daughters from having to be born in a country where baby girls are the victims of infanticide, or are dumped in orphanages, where girls, when ill, are neglected and left to die. There are far worse things than never to be born. Females who have made it to adolescence are married and will be on the beg and call of the mother-in-law as some kind of slave. The women who have a job are paid significantly lower wages than the males do, for the same work.
I wonder whether the governments are more concerned about the effect the imbalance of the sexes will have on men than they are about the fact that women are undervalued.

What are we more concerned about?
Are we making this into a men’s issue- oh dear, we have aborted so many female foetuses and killed so many girls that many of our men won’t be able to find a partner! Perhaps our men, without a wife or sisters, will even have to care for their own parents, how disastrous would that be?
Perhaps employers won’t be able to find enough workers to underpay.

Or are we more concerned about the fact that the women are undervalued and have been treated like second-rate citizens, like crap?
If these abortions didn’t affect men at all, would anyone bother to care?

Reducing sex selective abortion by measures such as prohibition and by preventing that prospective parents find out the fetus’s sex is merely an attempt to reduce the symptoms of a dysfunctional society and is not a cure for it.
Will infanticide increase when sex-selective abortion is denied?

Continued

The most important issue to deal with is that there is a real problem of inequality between males and females.
That female fetuses are being aborted far more than male fetuses is not something that needs more attention than the real problem does- inequality itself needs to be focused on and then the symptoms will solve itself.

We also need to be aware that poor countries like these receive no or very little aid that goes towards women’s rights. What can be done to improve situations for girls and to empower women? Developed nations, like the EU, are stuck with conservative countries like Ireland and Malta that are not willing to stress the importance of sexually educating and offering contraception to young people, esp. girls in these countries.

Work on sex equality and the sex imbalance problem will sort itself out.

Social engineering is being carried out through IVF, where a woman can select genetic traits from a male depending on what is written on a piece of paper. The woman need not ever meet the male.

The kits for determining the sex of the child have been available for some years, and it might not be long before a woman can legally take certain chemicals to induce an abortion without even contacting a doctor.

I have heard of no opposition to any of this from the feminist movement, and none of it is natural.

Next feminists will be saying that they believe in mother nature.