Angry in the Great White North

From Australia, concerns over a home test that can reveal the gender of a fetus:

To use the new test, a pregnant woman mixes her urine with the kit's chemicals in the supplied container. If it turns green or black, the fetus is a boy; orange or yellow indicate a girl.

The Royal Australian and New Zealand College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists is worried about what the test might lead to.

"The concern we would have is that people would then terminate pregnancies on the grounds of sex selection," said college president Dr Ted Weaver.

I can't imagine why this would be of any concern to people who are committed to providing easy access to abortion on demand.  If a fetus is not a person, then the question of gender is just an abstraction.  If a woman has the absolute right to terminate a pregnancy for any reason whatsoever, that has to include things like (a) a baby would put a crimp in her lifestyle, (b) children are a burden on the environment and she is doing what she can to help fight global warming, and (c) culturally boys are more valuable than girls.

So that last reason is a cultural attitude from some parts of the world.  So what?  If the right to privacy is what creates a right to abortion, then we can't be judging the reasons.

Nevertheless, everyone knows that gender selection as a determining factor for deciding to terminate a pregnancy is going mean an increase in aborted girls.

Well, not girls, per se, but female fetuses.  I can't be caught making a fetus sound like a person, now can I?

Damn, I've hit that non-person-with-a-gender problem.  Let's just say that blobs of cells with only X-chromosomes are likely to be targeted for abortion.

Again, so what?  They're not people, they have no rights, they can be thrown away at a whim.  Is a valueless female fetus somehow less valueless than a valueless male fetus?

But then we all know a fetus is a person, don't we?  Obviously that's true.  And so if we let women who belong to certain cultural communities check gender and so decide to abort girls, then there will be fewer girls.

Isn't that the ironic end point of the drive by women's groups to ensure that woman can have access to abortion on demand?

And here's the rub.  These same women's groups could agitate to have these tests taken off the market.  Why?  Because, presumably, some women will misuse this new knowledge, using the wrong reason to seek an abortion and so abort girls just for being girls (whereas aborting a baby for just being a baby is acceptable).

That leads to two questions:

1. If we've broached the question of whether there are good reasons and bad reasons for an abortion, can we review all reasons to seek an abortion and have a discussion about what reasons are good and what reasons are bad?  Can we then compel women to justify their decisions against this list of good and bad reasons?
2. Would we even be having this discussion if we all knew that gender selection culturally favoured girls over boys in cultures in which one gender is favoured over another?

The answer to the second question is, of course, no.  You could take issue with that, and it is true that I am speculating, since there is no such culture (at least none of significant size) so no way to be certain.

But it is clear that this issue is being raised only because one gender is likely to be favoured over another, and we know that this means boys over girls.  That has these people worried.  As long as death was shared out randomly to both boys and girls, these people didn't seem concerned at all. 

I guess this is what they call the banality of evil.  Oh wait, that phrase was invented by Hannah Arendt in discussing the Holocaust.  That was a totally different sort of thing, identifying a helpless minority in society, stripping of them of their rights, and subjecting them to death for no crime other than being an inconvenient presence.

Sorry for confusing one thing for the other.  My understanding of human rights is not as sophisticated as it should be.