Feminists Silent as Girls are Targeted for Abortion in Canada

VANCOUVER, British Columbia – With virtually no abortion laws in Canada, sex selective “in vitro fertilization” (IVF) is now being advertised in Canadian news papers. And feminists, abortion rights most vocal proponents, are finding themselves in a bit of a challenge; clinics are specifically targeting immigrant couples who only want boys.

A fertility clinic in Washington State, just across the border, is targeting Indo-Canadians in British Columbia ads encouraging them to “create the family you want: Boy or Girl.” An advertised website directs parents interested in sex-selection to the Washington Center for Reproductive Medicine where they learn that pre-implantation genetic diagnosis (PGD) is the clinic’s preferred method for “selecting an embryo of known gender facilitating family balancing.”

This most recent publicity comes close on the heels of a new study, “Sex ratios among Canadian live born infants of mothers from different countries,” which appeared online in the Canadian Medical Association Journal.

The study analyzed 766,688 live single births in Ontario between 2002 and 2007. The male to female ratio of babies born to Canadian-born women was constant at 105 boys for every 100 girls, whether the women had previous children or not. The study found, however, that for women who migrated to Ontario from South Korea and who already had one child, the ratio of male to female births was 120 to 100. For mothers with one child who had emigrated from India, the ratio of male to female births was 111 to 100. For mothers from India with two children, the ratio of male to female births dramatically widened to 136 to 100. For Canadian-born mothers with two children, the ratio of male to female births remained constant at 105 to 100.

Sabrina Atwal, project director for the Indo-Canadian Women’s Association in Edmonton said she is “appalled” by the ads and that it was indicative of the devaluation faced by women and girls in Indo-Canadian communities. “Girls are fighting for their lives before they’re even born,” she said.

In an op-ed that appeared yesterday in the National Post, Kelly McParland belittled Canadians who are appalled by current sex selection practices in what he called the country’s “free-for-all baby market.”

With no law on abortion in the country, McParland pointed out that the sex selection clinic would be “perfectly justified” in going even further. “Why not be specific, with a two-for-one special on male twins? Crude? You bet. Barbaric? Some would say that, but certainly not feminists, who support sex selection as another legitimate choice for women to make, and which is none of our business.”

McParland says the sex selection practice merely points out a colossal logical conundrum faced by pro-abortion feminists. They have built their entire argument on an “abortion-on-demand-for-any-reason” platform. As a result, they and their spokesman are reacting against any warnings against practices such as used in sex selection procedures.

Canada’s legal-abortion advocates strongly opposed a proposal put forward last January by Dr. Rajendra Kale, editor of the Canadian Medical Association Journal, to combat the practice of female feticide that he had observed in Canada’s ethnic populations. Dr. Kale had suggested at that time that the country prohibit disclosing a child’s sex until 30 weeks gestation, when, he said, “an unquestioned abortion is all but impossible.” The doctor termed the willful termination of an unborn girl “discrimination against women in its most extreme form.”

At that time, Joyce Arthur of the Abortion Rights Coalition of Canada argued against restricting female feticide, calling any such proposal a “dangerous road to go down” because “women have the right to decide” even if someone does not agree with their reasons.

The Society of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists also criticized Dr. Kale’s proposal, arguing that he had “failed to acknowledge the cultural values and norms that lead certain individuals to pursue pregnancy termination based on the gender of the fetus.”

So-called “pro-woman” groups like the Abortion Rights Coalition of Canada and the Society of Obstetricians and Gynecologists oppose any restrictions on sex-selective abortions because they know it would be logically inconsistent to accept anything but total access to abortion.

They know that granting the smallest of protections for the unborn, like a ban on coercive abortions, opens the door to a national discussion they want closed.