Abortion in India

This link on the treatment of women and unborn female children in India. This is part three of a four part series, but there are links at the bottom of the page to the first two parts.

I wasn't really surprised about the inequity of births - that's been happening in China for quite a while as well, but what dismays me is the abuse of women to balance the inequity. From the media reports I read, that wasn't happening in the parts of China they visited. Incest, yes, but not the buying and selling and trading around of women.

I dunno - why didn't anyone see this coming? Give people the choice, and a lot of them are going to make what we consider bad choices. Aborting a baby because it's a one or the other sex is worse than because it's inconvenient.

And I love the outrage. I mean, don't get me wrong - I'm outraged too - but then I'm outraged whenever anybody decides to abort, wherever they live and whatever their reasons. What gets me is that it's okay to choose to abort a child, but only for reasons "we" approve of. Um, if you give someone the right to do something, their reasons don't have to meet with your approval. Yes, it's wrong, but it's still the woman's choice, right?

I got into a lot of trouble for telling a woman who lived down the road from me that I disapproved of her reasons for aborting her and her husband's fourth child - they "couldn't afford it" is what she said. I'm sorry, I replied, if you can't afford another child, then sell the SUV, move to a cheaper part of town, and cut out the ski trips to Mount Washington every other weekend. We don't live in a poor part of town, and our housing prices and property taxes are among the highest in the city. What she meant was, she didn't want to be bothered or have her lifestyle disrupted. That's a cheesy reason - almost as bad as because it does or doesn't have external plumbing.

But here, in this country, I am castigated because I disapprove of her choices - but it's okay for people here to disapprove of the reasons for women choosing to abort in another country. I wonder if these women aren't so much bowing to cultural pressure as they are misguidedly thinking they're doing their babies a favour - from the accounts of India's culture, being a woman there is not worth the effort - maybe it's a massive protest. And even if it's not, why the heck do we think we can stand in judgment on another culture? Most of us have no inkling of what it's like to live in India and be a woman - so what right do we have to say they should or shouldn't do this?

I applaud the women & men in India who are doing something about this - at great personal risk. But for us to sanctimoniously stand up and disapprove is nauseating.