Gender Selection

Pretty nasty stuff, that. Take, for example, the quandary that China now finds itself in with its one-child policy and the wish of Chinese to raise male children, in the process finding it expedient to abort female foetuses to achieve their selection goal. Well, young men looking about for female companionship are just plain out of luck. There's a distinct paucity of young women in China to pair with the young men.

Perhaps there's a sinister plan behind all of this. Government intervention in stemming the rising population tide has succeeded beyond its wildest imagination. The result, after all, of the one-child policy and the lack of girl children will translate in fewer marriages and, obviously, fewer offspring.

Population density solved. But then, what to do with all those restive young men bereft of female companionship? It is, after all, the most elemental of human desires, to couple, to pass on DNA. It is an inhuman solution to a very human need, one certain to result, sooner or later, in violent backlash as men revolt against this truncation of their familial aspirations.

And, given the large immigrant population within Canada from those countries of the world like India and China which practise gender selection by aborting the foetuses they don't want, it is becoming a Canadian problem, a moral one at the very least. This is a nasty way to use ultrasound scans and abortion procedures.

And now, two Canadians, a bio-ethicist and a medical doctor are protesting the current situation prevailing here, as professionals and humanitarians.

"I think Canadians have a sort of visceral reaction to the idea that people would terminate a pregnancy based on gender alone", explained Brendan Leier, of Edmonton's Stollery Children's Hospital, co-author of the recommendations contained in a major obstetrics journal that doctors abstain from relaying gender information to prospective mothers until later in the pregnancy.

Some abortion advocates appear to be debating the issue as being "paternalistic", and as such, insulting to women. Actually, no. Since, in all likelihood, it is men coming from societies which insist a boy has more value than a girl, who insist that their wives carry male babies to term. As a cultural norm, this is fairly male-centric, so to term a remedial system denying information to advance an abortion is not quite "paternalistic", but "objectively moral".

Furthermore, it is in keeping with the official policies of professional groups such as the Society of Obstetrics and Gynecology of Canada, which outright condemns sex selection, as pointed out by the obstetrics and gynecology resident-half of the equation, Dr. Allison Thiele, of the University of Saskatchewan. And as it happens, it would appear that doctors in British Columbia (which boasts both a high immigrant Indian and Chinese population) already use this approach.

So why not - given the current reality of abortions regularly being sought to ensure that male babies are the norm in these societies - make this universal across Canada? This is simply yet another instance of immigrant groups bringing to their adoptive country practises of questionable moral value not recognized as useful in Canada. This is a matter for educating this particular demographic that this is not done in Canada.

So, in a sense, Joyce Arthur, co-ordinator of the Abortion Rights Coalition of Canada who says that it would be preferable to combat the social mores leading people to reject daughters and seek sons, rather than deny abortions for that purpose. However, in the meantime, since the practise has been so prevalent, it must be addressed in the here and now.

And the suggested protocol by bioethicist Brendan Leier and his colleague Dr. Allison Thiele appears the right way to turn the tide. Research out of the University of Toronto's Centre for Global Health Research concluded that ten million female fetuses had been aborted in India in two decades. This is not a very enviable record of extinguishing the potential of ten million girl babies.

It really isn't the kind of practise that should be accepted in Canada, just as female circumcision isn't, or the oppressive domination of women by their male family members through customs that have been traditional in their countries of origin.