Baby Girls Should Not Be Aborted Just Because They are Girls
Yesterday, I testified before the Assembly Health Committee in favor of AB 217, the Prenatal Nondiscrimination Act. The main provision of AB 217 is: “No person shall intentionally perform or attempt to perform an abortion with knowledge that the pregnant woman is seeking the abortion on account of the sex of the unborn child.” Sex- selection abortion is used to prevent the birth of a child solely based on the gender of the unborn child. The victims of these abortions are overwhelmingly female which is the ultimate gender discrimination.
Sex-election abortion is rampant in some Asian nations, especially China and India, where male children are widely preferred over females. But it has spread to other continents and is now practiced here in the United States. Multiple academic papers have put forward evidence that the practice of sex-selection abortion is increasing in the United States especially, although not exclusively, within communities of immigrants from Asia.
For example, a study by researchers at the University of Connecticut, published in Prenatal Diagnosis in March 2011, concluded “The male to female live birth sex ratio in the United States exceeded expected biological variation for third+ births to Chinese, Asian Indians and Koreans, strongly suggesting prenatal sex selection.”
Dr. Sunita Puri and three other researchers at the University of California interviewed “65 immigrant women in the United States who had pursued fetal sex selection.” They wrote, “We found that 40% of the women interviewed had terminated prior pregnancies with female fetuses and 89% of women carrying female fetuses in their current pregnancy pursued an abortion.”
The United States is the only industrialized country that has not banned abortions based solely on the sex of a child. Wisconsin must reject the notion that it is acceptable to abort a little unborn girl, merely because she is a girl. The escalating war on baby girls must be stopped in its tracks.
Barbara Lyons