The Indian crisis of sex selection abortion is worsening. From the AP story:
More and more Indian families with one girl are aborting subsequent pregnancies when prenatal tests show another female is on the way, according to a new study published Tuesday. The decline in the number of girls is more pronounced in richer and better educated households, according to research in the medical journal Lancet. Those numbers show that a 1996 law that bans testing for the gender of a fetus has been largely ineffective, the study said. In India, there is a huge cultural preference for boys in large part because of the enormous expense in marrying off girls and paying elaborate dowries. Officials have acknowledged that current laws have proved inadequate at combatting the widening sex ratio gap.
The study said that between 4 million and 12 million girls are thought have been aborted from 1980 to 2010. Raw data from India’s census released in March showed 914 girls under age 6 for every 1,000 boys. A decade ago, many were horrified when the ratio was 927 to 1,000.
What a tragedy. But who are we to complain? We use prenatal tests to search and destroy fetuses with genetic anomalies such as Down syndrome and dwarfism.
Pick your poison. Pre natal testing combined with abortion are now used throughout the world to identify and cull categories of unwanted human beings.
