by Celia Walden, Telegraph
The idea of engineering your children like you’re picking toppings on a pizza makes me queasy
Why would the SNP be considering plans to allow women to abort babies because of their sex, I wonder? Could it have anything to do with the practice being most prevalent within certain ethnic communities? Certainly, the abortion law review – commissioned by former First Minister, Humza Yousaf – goes to great lengths to avoid making sex-selective abortions (SSA) the obvious central issue, with the ruling out of a specific ban on SSA delivered almost as an aside.
“[The review group] believed that any prohibition would be unworkable in practice,” explains Prof Anna Glasier, who led the group, “requiring either intrusive and inappropriate questioning of all women regarding their motivation for seeking abortion, or racial profiling and additional questioning of a smaller proportion of women from ethnic communities where sex-selective abortion is believed to be practised”.
“Believed” to be practised, or known to be practised? Because there’s no room for obfuscation when you’re potentially rewriting abortion laws. And Glasier will presumably know that SSA isn’t only endorsed by religious nations (Islamic and Hindu nations) but secular communist countries too, where once again, it has absolutely nothing to do with a woman’s right. Nevertheless, she insists, the greater wrong would be denying a woman an SSA, since that would compel her “to continue a pregnancy she wanted to – or was being pressured to – end”.
There is, of course, another option. Which is to make it clear that here in the UK, we consider the practice of sex-selective abortion abhorrent and dystopian, morally repugnant in a laundry list of different ways. By upholding its illegality. Because if the SNP open the door to it, how soon until others begin to question why they too should not be allowed to choose the sex of their children, until the conversation broadens out?