MPs must wake up to the sex-selective abortion nightmare
by Caroline Farrow, TCW:
Far be it from me to be ageist, but you have to wonder whether or not it’s time for the 81-year-old Wendy Savage, retired gynaecologist and obstetrician, to step down from British Medical Association’s ethics committee, as she appears to have a tenuous grasp of facts and reality.
In an interview with the Mail on Sunday, Professor Savage makes the outrageous claim that women ought to be able to abort their babies on the grounds of their not being the desired gender right up until the point of birth.
According to our learned professor, “If a woman does not want to have a foetus who is one sex or the other, forcing her [to go through with the pregnancy] is not going to be good for the eventual child, and it’s not going to be good for [the mother’s] mental health.”
Which all sounds very convincing, except for the fact that this is all supposition. There is absolutely no data or empirical evidence to suggest that mothers prevented from having sex-selective abortions suffer any related mental health difficulties and neither is there similar research suggesting that outcomes are poorer for children whose mother had hoped that they might be the opposite gender. There is not a shred of evidence linking child neglect with a women not being able to have an abortion. And even if there were, would a woman’s distress morally justify her being able to kill her unborn baby, long past the point of viability, another thing that Professor Savage is asking for?
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