Reproductive Freedom and Sex Selection

Once you boil off the contempt for women so surprising in an argument from the forced pregnancy lobby (besides, everyone knows that the most common reason for obtaining an abortion isn’t to combat “lifestyle inconvenience” but to win six-packs of Zima on a bet), the thing is that James Joyner actually has a point: there’s no way of preventing women from obtaining abortions specifically for reasons of sex selection. (He is wrong, however, to describe the British abortion regime as “abortion on demand”; much more accurate would be to describe it as a “doctors can never be prosecuted” regime, which isn’t the same thing. While these kinds of statutes can be interpreted by doctors in a manner favorable to women’s rights, they are also ambiguous enough to allow doctors to deny abortions in all but life-threatening circumstances. You might have “abortion-on-demand” if you live in London, but if you’re a poor woman who lives in a town with a small number of doctors who look at your rights the same way Joyner does, not so much.) Obviously, there’s no way of telling whether a woman is obtaining an abortion for sex-selection, as opposed to another reason.

The problem is that Joyner’s argument proves too much for advocates of using arbitrary state coercion to constrain a woman’s right to get an abortion: Joyner’s argument is equally applicable to all of the regulations most commonly proposed to exploit public ambivalence about the ethics of some abortions. There is no way of expressing such ambivalence in legislative enactments, and this is equally true of preventing women from getting abortions for reasons of “lifestyle convenience” (whatever this means) as for reasons of sex selection. Leaving aside the question of why the judgments of James Joyner (or a panel of doctors who may have just met the patient) should trump the judgment of the woman whose life is at stake, abortion regulations do absolutely nothing to ensure that women will get abortions under circumstances that Joyner considers appropriate. Rather, they simply preserve the dread “abortion on demand” for affluent women while severely restricting abortion for poor women (especially those outside of urban centers), even if the latter have reasons for obtaining an abortion that Joyner would graciously concede are compelling. To try to use public ambivalence about abortion to advance regulations that don’t actually have any rational connection to the issues they purport to address is simply a gambit by anti-choicers who recognize the dearth of public support for any kind of principled pro-life position (which makes the willingness of many pro-choice centrists to pretend these arguments are serious all the more irritating.)

Moreover, if people are seriously concerned about sex selection in abortions, given that it’s impossible to legally ban it it’s worth considering the underlying factors that might lead to situations in which female fetuses are aborted at much higher rates. The most effective way of stopping this would be changes in the underlying social structures: if women are equally valued members of society, who contribute equally to a family’s economic productivity, there’s no reason to desire more male children. Which leads to the question: does limiting the reproductive autonomy of women help with such a project? Of course not–indeed, it’s counterproductive.