Sex Selection, Abortion and the Tragedy of the Commons.

It’s a Girl by Michael Stokes Paulsen:

It’s shocking, but incontrovertible: Two decades ago, Harvard economist Amartya Sen, in an arrestingly titled article, documented the statistical reality that “More Than 100 Million Women Are Missing.” In a recently published book, Unnatural Selection, journalist Mara Hvistendahl convincingly demonstrates that the overwhelming reason for the increasingly large demographic disparity in the male-female birth ratio is sex-selection abortion. Hvistendahl estimates the number of missing or dead now to be 160 million and counting. Women have abortions because (among other reasons) they are able to learn the sex of their unborn baby and kill her if she’s a girl.


The phenomenon is most pronounced in certain Asian populations where the birth of girls is especially discouraged, but is not limited to Asia. Hvistendahl shows that sex-selection is not culturally or uniquely Asian. Male-child preference exists everywhere. Sex-selection abortion rises as birth rates fall, as wealth increases (especially in developing nations), and as technology for identifying a child’s gender in utero becomes more reliable and more available.

Sex-selection abortion occurs in America, too, and the practice is likely to increase. In August, a study in the Journal of the American Medical Association reported that a simple blood test seven weeks into pregnancy can reliably identify the sex of the child. Watch for a spike in abortion rates over the next few years as parents find it easier and cheaper to “choose” to have a boy by killing the fetus if—in a bitter reversal of an expression of joy—“it’s a girl.”

The shocking reality of sex-selection abortion cries out for laws banning the practice. Polls have shown that about 95% of the American people oppose sex-selection abortion. Even those who style themselves “pro-choice” overwhelmingly agree that abortion should not be allowed when the reason for such a choice is that the child to be born is female. The most pernicious radical feminist argument for abortion rights—that abortion is essential for “gender equality”—doubles back on itself in the case of sex-selection abortion: If abortion on the basis of the sex of the child—killing girls because they are not boys—is not sex discrimination, it is hard to know what is. (Hvistendahl is, awkwardly, pro-choice, yet horrified by the consequences of “unnatural selection.”)

Four states—Illinois, Pennsylvania, Oklahoma, and most recently Arizona—have enacted laws prohibiting sex-selection abortion. Those laws have yet to be tested in the courts. At least seven other states have considered bills that would ban the practice. A sex-selection-ban bill was introduced in Congress in 2009—I worked with committee staff on the bill—but it died in the then Democrat-controlled House.

Are such bans constitutional, under the Supreme Court’s decisions creating a right to abortion? The question such laws present is a dramatic one, challenging the underpinnings of Roe v. Wade in the most fundamental and direct of ways: Does the U.S. Constitution create a right to abortion, even when the woman’s reason for abortion is that she does not like the sex of her unborn child?

Sadly, the answer, under the Supreme Court’s absurd, through-the-looking-glass constitutional law of abortion, is yes. Under Roe and the Court’s 1992 decision in Planned Parenthood v. Casey, a woman has a constitutional right to abort for any reason up to the point of “viability,” when the child could live outside the mother’s womb. Even after viability, a woman may abort for any “health” reason, an exception that ends up swallowing the rule: The Court’s abortion decisions define “health” justifications for abortion to include any “emotional,” “psychological,” or “familial” reason for wanting an abortion.

It seems that this might be the achille's heels of modernity's fetish for individualism; there simply are cases where the "right" choice for an individual is manifestly the "wrong" choice for society.