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interesting New York Times piece last week captured how that
(supposedly) most modern and liberal of rights, abortion, can serve
the most retrograde of impulses.
According to
the Times, various advertisements for sex-selection services,
one of which strongly hints at abortion, have appeared in the two
publications geared to Indian expatriates living in the United States.
Indian families
presumably have the traditional preference for a son over a daughter
— so they would want to learn the sex of their fetus only to destroy
it if it's a female.
This is why
sex-discrimination tests have been banned in India (if ineffectively).
But here in the United States where abortion reigns and the most
tepid efforts to tame it are bitterly resisted, encouraging sex-selection
abortion is part of the pageantry of "choice."
It is a sign
of the hold abortion has on the Left that it trumps all other P.C.
sensitivities.
In our political
culture, few things are so nefarious as "disparate impact."
If the bids of black contractors are being disproportionately rejected,
it's a budding scandal. But if abortion disproportionately erases
black children — as it does — that is a fact hardly worthy of mention.
We have a national
conversation over "the crisis of girls" supposedly losing
confidence in their adolescence, but to the extent that sex-selection
abortion exists in the U.S., it surely works to the disadvantage
of very young girls — but not a peep from the feminists.
In our A.D.A.-crazed
culture, movie theaters have to be equipped to assist the near-dear,
but no one complains at the way children with Down's Syndrome are
systematically eliminated from the womb. (Last Sunday's New York
Times Magazine, by the way, in an article on "Big Families"
profiled some heroically "pro-life" families — parents
that go out of their way to adopt handicapped children over and
over again.)
All these politically
incorrect abortions get a pass just like all the others, because
the abortion lobby hates the idea that any abortion is in any way
problematic. That right cast a shadow over the whole enterprise.
To its credit,
one of the Indian-American publications has decided to refuse to
run anymore of the sex-selection ads. Feminists should be delighted.
Shouldn't they?
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