Should Baby's Sex First Be Revealed to Parents At 30 Weeks?
Did you see this on The Stir? Do you think information about a baby's sex should be withheld?
Posted by Julie Ryan Evans on January 17, 2012 at 12:29 PM
As we've become accustomed to the ability to find out our baby's sex long before he or she is born, it's jolting to think that privilege (or right, depending how you feel about it) could be taken away. No more gender reveal cakes! But some doctors say the information should at least be delayed in order to prevent people from aborting babies who aren't the sex they want.
In Canada, a call has been made to delay the revelation of a fetus's gender until 30 weeks. Typically the information is given during an ultrasound in the 20th week, when abortion is a more readily available option.
While it's not a widespread problem in the United States or Canada, gender-based abortion does happen. In an article in the Canadian Medical Journal, Dr.Rajendra Kale referred to a small study in the U.S. of 65 immigrant Indian women. In it, 40 percent had terminated earlier pregnancies, and 89 percent had an abortion in their subsequent pregnancies because they were having girls. He says a baby's sex is "medically irrelevant," besides special cases in which gender-related diseases are an issue.
It seems extreme and ridiculous to punish the masses for the choices of a few, but if that's what it takes to prevent such atrocities, then perhaps it's for the best. A little patience is small price to pay.
Much of the practice is cultural and based on how women are treated in certain countries, but there are and will certainly be those who do it for simply selfish reasons as well. And the bigger implications are frightening as more and more information about our unborn babies becomes available. First, it's things like diseases they may carry and their sex, and before you know it, people are aborting babies because they don't have blue eyes or they have a birth mark somewhere. At some point we have to stop and question how much information is really valuable and how much creates unnecessary ethical problems.
The bottom line here is this: Knowing the sex of one's baby is nice for planners, but it's not necessary. Stopping something as abhorrent as sex selective abortions is.
Do you think information about a baby's sex should be withheld from parents if it helps prevent some abortions based on sex selection?
Image via handmaidenbymaria/Flickr
So we should just give up yet another freedom? Has it occurred to anyone who thinks it's okay to let the government take over this decision, too, that the people who are likely to abort based on gender are the same ones who could probably afford to pay a doctor secretly to give them the information about the child's gender anyway, that it's these kinds of people who would even consider ending an unborn child's life based exclusively on gender? Most abortions are requested by young women (or little girls) who are poor, come from a broken home, were raped, are afraid of being kicked out of the house by their parents, etc. - the gender of the child is the absolute last reason they have for seeking that abortion.
Heck, anyone who is willing to bend over and take this one, too, should just give up and go live in Japan or some communist country where the word "individual" has nothing to do with human beings. Liberty is precious, and I'm horrified at how much of it has already been sacrificed to appease those smug few who think they know better than everyone else what is best for each of us. Patience? How about the joy of knowing the gender of your unborn child and the once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to use that knowledge to prepare all the very best for that child in accordance with the gender? Waiting for the child to be born already takes enough patience; technology isn't always a bad thing. I mean, let me see a show of hands of all the women who would rather still be using torn-up rags instead of tampons or ultra-thin pads. Yeah. We could be patient about that too, but why should we?
Sorry. Didn't mean to go off on a rant. I'm simply tired of people's oh-well attitude that allows them to justify stupid laws designed for one thing only - destroy freedom in America.
I'm not convinced that selective sex abortion is an issue in the U.S. If it is, the people who want it would make bad parents whether or not they succeeded in aborting a fetus with a gender they didn't like. Any attempt to prevent a woman from having an abortion as early as possible in her pregnancy is an affront to her freedom to control her body.
Maybe parents who want to select the gender of their kid (if there are lot of prospective parents like that out there) should think about adopting.
How early did you start to swell
- Cafe Kate
on Jan. 18, 2012 at 6:11 PM