Sweden legalizes “gender based” abortion

I’ve written about sex selective abortion in the past, but now Sweden has explicitly legalized the practice (via ProWomanProLife):

The Local reported that a pregnant woman in South Sweden, who already has two girls, arrived at Mälaren Hospital and inquired whether or not she would be giving birth to another girl. She went on to tell her doctors that her previous two pregnancies ended in abortion because she did not want to have another girl – and if this child was another girl, she would have it aborted as well.

Doctors expressed concern over this and brought it to the attention of Sweden’s National Board of Health and Welfare. They asked how to handle requests where doctors felt “pressured to examine the [fetus’s] gender” without a medical rationale.

The Board came back and said that requests to for abortions based on a child’s gender cannot be refused.

The commentary on ProWomanProLife is excellent. Andrea writes:

This is what “family planning” means. It means you get to plan your family, dotting “i”s and crossing “t”s–controlling the minute aspects, which in this unprecedented age, we can control. Just a couple of years ago, this would not have been possible. Have two girls already? Get rid of the next couple as you try for the boy. Because you want a boy. Now if you are pro-choice, this really, really shouldn’t bother you. This is what they wanted–they being the Planned Parenthood types of the world. I hate to be so harsh, but when they said we should be able to “plan parenthood” including abortion when all else fails, did they honestly mean to exclude choices about sex?

Rebecca points out that some gay rights activists oppose abortion entirely, largely because, if any sort of genetic means of determining whether or not a baby will be gay is ever developed, they fear that people might abort gay fetuses.

This is the same sort of thing I argued in my original post on sex selective abortion — why are some feminists outraged by this? If you’re intellectually honest, you’ll realize that the source of the outrage is really abortion, and not sexism. Gender based abortions are offensive because women are being killed for being women, but in recognizing this, you also need to recognize that women are being killed. Then what of every other reason for abortion?

The reason for an abortion doesn’t change what abortion is, it just sometimes forces you to consider it from a different perspective. If people are honest in their outrage over things like this, they should really reconsider their view on abortion in general. What makes gender based abortions any more wrong than aborting a fetus because it has a disability, or because it was conceived at an inconvenient time, or because the father is no longer around?

An outrage over this sort of practice should force any intellectually honest person to ask themselves the question, “what is abortion?” and ultimately, “what is the unborn?” to find the source of their outrage. It’s abortion that’s offensive.