Abortion to eliminate girls

Wesley Smith at the First Things blog reports that ultra-liberal, ultra-progressive, ultra-feminist Sweden has made it legal to abort babies for gender selection, which almost always means getting rid of baby girls:

Abortion was supposed to liberate women and protect them from unwanted pregnancies. But with prenatal testing and all, it is increasingly being used as a eugenic search and destroy tool to eliminate unwanted types of children prior to birth. In other words, eugenic abortion mixed with pre-implantation genetic diagnosis in IVF—and I believe, eventually infanticide—is transforming procreation from being about having children to about having only the kind of children we want.

One targeted class of this eugenic technique is girls. In India and China, ultrasound is used to identify female fetuses for elimination—a practice so ubiquitous that a huge disparity now exists between male and female demographics. Now, gender abortion has been approved in, of all places, Sweden. . . .

How ironic: In the name of freeing women, Sweden allows open season to be declared on female fetuses (who, let’s face it, will be the usual targets of gender selection). India and China have at least outlawed this eugenic cleansing, making those countries more advanced in protecting against gender based eugenics than “enlightened” Sweden.

And in the US? A bill has been introduced in Congress (H.B. 1822) to prevent gender and racially based abortions: It has no chance of passage.

Pro-life activists should push this bill hard. They should then publicize what the bill’s opponents have to say on the issue.