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Hard Cases for Defenders of Abortion
Published in Christopher Kaczor, The Ethics of Abortion, 2023
Though many feminist defenders of abortion would undoubtedly be troubled by such a conclusion, how could they consistently criticize sex selection abortions without also implying that abortion, in general, is problematic? Many pro-choice advocates hold that sex selection abortion is morally problematic, if not impermissible. However, most arguments against sex selection abortion only make sense on the implicit assumption that the human fetus is a being due to moral respect, and this premise renders problematic, not just sex selection abortion, but abortion generally. Wishing to avoid this implicit assumption, Wendy Rogers, Angela Ballantyne, and Heather Draper (2007), in their article, “Is Sex-Selective Abortion Morally Justified and Should It Be Prohibited?” provide several arguments that sex selection abortion is wrong without endorsing (they believe even implicitly) the intrinsic value of the human fetus as female or male (Rogers et al. 2007).
The other side of geographies and cultures
Published in Wendy A. Rogers, Jackie Leach Scully, Stacy M. Carter, Vikki A. Entwistle, Catherine Mills, The Routledge Handbook of Feminist Bioethics, 2022
Jing-Bao Nie, Xiang Zou, Karen Thornber
Our point here is not to debate whether sex-selective abortion is ethically justifiable, or how legal and public policies should respond to it. Nor do we wish to dismiss numerous apparent and even fundamental differences between the non-Western and Western worlds. Rather, our point is that the prominence of issues like sex-selective abortion and female circumcision (“genital mutilation,” as it is called by opponents of the practice) may serve as, and have been used as, salient pieces of “evidence” to reinforce the ready belief that societies and cultures in the Global South are profoundly and radically different from those in the Global North with regard to their gender attitudes. However, we contend that such dichotomizing habits of thought about cultures is misleading. This is because the spirit and various doctrines of ethical universalism lie at the core of the indigenous moral traditions, such as Confucianism, of non-Western cultures. Such dichotomized thinking is also flawed because it overlooks the positive resources in non-Western cultures and societies for globalizing feminist bioethics.
The Health and Well-Being of the Left-Behind Elderly in Rural China
Published in Goh Cheng Soon, Gerard Bodeker, Kishan Kariippanon, Healthy Ageing in Asia, 2022
Possibly more than any other factor, the one-child policy introduced in 1979, which restricted the number of children a couple could have to one without being subject to financial penalties, has resulted in long-term demographic changes that have reduced the number of children who can care for one’s parents. Household size in rural China has decreased from 3.61 in 2004 to 3.19 in 2013 (Xiang, Jiang and Zhao, 2016). Furthermore, in a society where males are strongly favoured, some parents have resorted to sex-selective abortion and female infanticide to secure male heirs (Hu and Shi, 2020). The resulting imbalanced sex ratio (116 males per 100 females in 2010) further problematizes elder care that normatively is the domain of daughters, who are now solely responsible for the care of their own parents as well as those of her husband’s (Ibid.).
Continuity and change: Violations of private patriarchal practices and domestic violence against rural wives in China
Published in Health Care for Women International, 2022
Third, the traditional patrilineality has also been eroded by the one-child policy. To restrict population growth, the Chinese government launched the one-child policy from 1979 to 2006 as part of a birth-planning program designed to control the size of the rapidly growing population. However, the imbalanced sex ratio has been prevalent, and families whose first children are daughters may break quotas, have sex-selective abortions, abandon their infants, or even commit infanticide in their quest for a son (Bossen, 2007). As a result, China still has recorded a seriously imbalanced sex ratio since the implementation of the one-child policy, particularly in rural areas. Although rural women are still intensely pressured by the tradition of son preference, the implementation of family planning policy for more than three decades, to a great extent, has altered Chinese family size and structure, reduced the significance of patrilineal lineage, promoted the popularity of uxorilocal marriage, and encouraged women to make nontraditional life choices (Hong, 1987).
Running an obstacle-course: a qualitative study of women’s experiences with abortion-seeking in Tamil Nadu, India
Published in Sexual and Reproductive Health Matters, 2022
This paper captures the lived experiences of married women from rural Tamil Nadu in India, with specific reference to their experiences with terminating an unwanted pregnancy. Unwanted pregnancy in the context of this paper is a pregnancy that either occurred when the woman did not want to have any more pregnancies or was mistimed. The study does not include unwanted pregnancies in the context of fetal anomaly and sex-selective abortion. As Mallik points out, sex-selective abortion is “not the result of unintended or unwanted pregnancy. It is a gendered preference for a certain type of pregnancy that guides the decision to undergo sex-selective abortion”.31 In this study, the author has therefore attempted to distinguish unwanted pregnancies from pregnancies ending in sex-selective abortions. This study attempts to locate unwanted pregnancy and abortion-seeking experiences of married women within the context of their everyday lives and women’s agency. The study demonstrates the restricted and exclusionary nature of abortion services offered by healthcare providers. It further analyses the impact of these exclusionary practices on the health and wellbeing of women who are already constrained by everyday patriarchal forces operating in their private sphere. By exploring the life stories of women at the margins, this paper examines alternative pathways that could enable women to access safe abortion services.
Pragmatics of everyday life: A qualitative study of induced abortion among Tibetan women in Lhasa
Published in Health Care for Women International, 2020
Induced abortion has been legal in the People’s Republic of China since the 1950s (Tien, 1987). Sex-selective abortions, however, are forbidden according to the increasingly strict Rule of Prohibiting Non-Medical Prenatal Sex Diagnosis and Sex-Selective Abortion issued by the National Population and Family Planning Commission. According to available statistics, unintended pregnancies account for the majority of induced abortions in China (Qian et al., 2004). Studies of abortion practices in China have found that the primary reasons for unintended pregnancies were contraception failure (36–50%) and nonuse of contraception (44–64%) (Cheng et al., 2008; Wu et al., 2015), which raises questions about the availability and utilization of effective contraception.