As a feminist, I’m obviously pro-choice. And also, as a feminist I absolutely condemn selective abortions, because they are a consequence of systemic discrimination against women and girls, and a most blatant example of reproductive coercion and family pressure that destroys consent and bodily autonomy.
I was informed that the gender of a fetus is known very late in the pregnancy process, therefore the choice to be pregnant is already confirmed at that stage. That’s how far the right to choose goes imho. I personally find the first weeks of an unwanted pregnancy the most debilitating where many of us lose our will to live, so abortions are best performed in the first 8 weeks (if you don’t kill yourself before of course). If you can pass those critical weeks, then I consider that you chose to be pregnant. The right to choose doesn’t extend to killing off anyone without a penis.
Of course, I don’t take in account widespread family coercion among certain communities that force people to remain pregnant or to abort depending on the absence of a penis in the fetus. We can’t fix that through selective abortions though.
Canada allows gender-based killings of fetuses, and I am not holding my breath for any progress in that regard, but if anyone cares, I think that the Criminal Code must be amended to create a specific offence akin to voluntary homicide (it is not a homicide because the term only applies to humans recognized by law, and you are not a human until after you are born and deemed viable at law). This specific offence shouldn’t carry a jail sentence, because it would be pointless and not a good deterrent. In my opinion, there needs to be a hefty 6 figure fine on the family, and/or deportation of the whole family, because these decisions don’t happen in a vacuum. They are imposed on women.
Deportation is cheaper than jail and is likely to be more effective both to make sure that Canada doesn’t harbour gender-based hate promoters, and to educate families that selective abortions are not acceptable cultural practice, but a crime.
Physicians however who perform sex based abortions (or pretend they didn’t know) should absolutely get a jail sentence AND they should lose their licence because they willingly and recklessly compromise the safety of women and encourage reproductive coercion, which goes against their mission to protect the public.
Moreover, I was informed that gender-discovery is very damaging to fetuses when made for non-medical purposes, such as trying to screen a fetus for 30 minutes at a time to discover the gender. I don’t understand why it is not criminalized like in India and the UK.
Given that these echographies are performed for frivolous, non-medical reasons, there should be fines and jail-time for physicians who perform gender discovery procedures.
This being said, I am highly disappointed with studies that criticize laws that ban selective abortions as xenophobic. I am taking distance from these studies because they are clearly full of shit.
I have zero issue with stigmatizing communities that perform sex-selective abortions. They should be publicly condemned. As I said, if any of this would be up to me, I’d be deporting entire families that force women to undergo such abortions.
You can’t accommodate every hater of progressive values on this planet. Cultures that from the outset discriminate against girls should be called out and sent to re-education to align with Western values.
Feminism is based on a normal Western-based patriarchy. This is something else. Being pro-choice means you respect women’s bodily autonomy, rather than the backward idea that a boy fetus has more value than a girl fetus. That’s coming from a medieval and brutal patriarchy and has nothing to do with modern values or the movement for equality. It is the exact opposite of equality.
Publications like this one are doing more harm to equality than the entire right-wing base, because they equate feminism with protecting patriarchal communities. I’m not having it. Sorry! https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0277953625007737
After a heated argument with AI which tried to convince me that the problem is not widespread, but had to eventually cave and admit it was wrong because I have a photographic memory and cross-examined the AI on all the global articles I read over New Years, here are some links I find worthy to look at: