ninme

The Times – Thank heavens for little girl embryos, by Melanie McDonagh

The Human Tissues and Embryos Bill gets its first reading in the Lords today. That’s the one that is going to provide an opportunity to revise the abortion law. Given the number of things in the Bill that will have peers at each other’s throats, in the contained sort of way they do things there, it is gratifying to reflect that it is likely to include one measure about which there will be universal agreement. And that is a proposed ban on the sex selection of embryos for non-medical reasons. In other words, people undergoing IVF who want to weed out female embryos on the ground that they’d prefer a boy will get short shrift.

Because we’ve seen how well that law has worked in India. And we’ve seen how well the British authorities do at enforcing laws on the sorts of communities wherein this is likely to be an issue. Anyway:

The same principle is true of abortion, which will be discussed under cover of this Bill. Pro-choice campaigners argue for a woman’s right to decide whether to continue with a pregnancy or not. Yet if the reason for her not wanting the baby is that it happens to be a girl – as happens routinely in India – those same individuals will get on their moral high horse.

But why is it OK to do away with a female foetus because it would be inconvenient to continue with the pregnancy, but really, really wrong to have it aborted on the grounds of gender?

Weird.