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Introduction

What is a selective abortion?

Most abortions are caused because the pregnancy is unplanned and having a child causes a crisis for the woman.

Therapeutic abortions result from a medical problem where allowing the pregnancy to continue to birth would endanger the woman's health.

Selective abortions, which are a small fraction of all abortions, occur in those cases where a particular foetus is perceived as having undesirable characteristics. Selective abortion is also done when there are too many foetuses in a pregnancy.

These include cases where:

• the unborn child is a girl, and the parents, for cultural or other reasons, want a boy
• the foetus is defective
• the foetus does not suit the parents in some other way
• the pregnancy is intended to produce a child with specific genetic properties, and this foetus doesn't have them

Fertility treatment

A different sort of selective abortion occurs when the pregnancy involves several foetuses, and unless one or more are aborted all the foetuses will be endangered - therefore some of the unborn must be removed for the good of the others. This case is usually a result of fertility treatment.

The ethics of selective abortion

Selective abortions raise all the other ethical issues associated with abortion, but they raise several issues of their own as well.

Sex-selective abortion

Sex-selective abortion

An Indian mother registers at a family planning clinic

Modern medicine allows parents to learn the sex of a baby before it is born, and in some cultures this can lead to a foetus being aborted if it is female.

In the 2000s this has been of particular concern in India, where it is partly responsible for a low and declining population ratio of women to men - there were 972 females against 1,000 males in 1901 and 933 females against 1,000 males in 2001. The Hindu newspaper reported in 2002 that "in Delhi, one in seven female foetuses is said to be aborted."

Similar issues have caused concern in South Korea and China.

The preference for male children is part of the general inequality of women in some cultures. This is largely economic and due to reasons like these:

• family continuity depends on sons
• girls cannot hold property in some societies so a male child is essential for a family to retain its wealth
• girls are transitory members of a family - they marry and leave home
• even while girls remain in the family they generally earn less than boys
• the family may have to produce a dowry when a girl child marries (this could be regarded as a back door way of a woman getting to inherit some of the family wealth)
• boys bring in a dowry when they marry, adding to the family wealth
• a wife's status (and thus her economic security) is not consolidated until she produces a son
• the trend to small families means that parents don't want to have several girl children before having a son

One letter writer to the Indian press summed the situation up like this:

The practice of aborting female foetuses not only stems from a demeaning attitude to women, but reinforces it. Surprisingly this attitude to women is so deeply ingrained that it is commonly found in women as well as men.

It would be easy to regard female infanticide and (nowadays) foeticide as ancient practices that the modernisation of society should soon finish off. But some Indian social scientists disagree, and regard it:

This letter to an Indian newspaper in 2002 illustrates the problem:

Sex-selective abortion (usually referred to as 'female foeticide') is illegal under Indian law, but the law is not strictly enforced and the practice is widespread.

In 2001 The Tribune newspaper of Chandigarh, India reported that the estimated number of sex-selective abortions in 1996-98 was 62,000 in Haryana (81% of total abortions) and 51000 in Punjab (26%).

The paper found that the skewing of gender ratios in firstborn children was stronger in Punjab, where the sex ratio at birth (SRB) was 131, than in Haryana with SRB 109. Preference for a son following the birth of a daughter was almost equally strong in Haryana and Punjab with SRB being 151 and 154, respectively.

Countrywide surveys have shown that sex-selective abortion is more common in wealthier families and in urban areas (partly because access to the technology is easier, and the economic drive stronger).

Sex-selective infanticide and IVF

Sex selective infanticide

Sex selection is evident up to the age of 5 - the period when a child depends most on its parents for survival.

Female infanticide may not be done by a positive act of killing a female baby, but by favouring male babies in the areas of:

• feeding
• parental care
• medical care

IVF and selective abortion

IVF (in vitro fertilisation) is a medical procedure used to help some infertile couples. A woman's ovaries are stimulated to produce multiple eggs which are fertilised with her partner's sperm. This produces several fertilised embryos, some of which are placed in her womb, and the others are frozen for possible later use.

Two ethical problems then arise:

• because several embryos are implanted to increase the chance of a successful pregnancy, multiple births can occur. Some couples choose selective reduction instead - the destruction of some of the embryos early in the pregnancy - either because they don't want so many children, or in order to improve the survival chances of the other embryos.
• if the stored embryos are eventually removed from storage and disposed of, this could be regarded as abortion. Legislation such as the Texas Prenatal Protection Act makes such disposal an unlawful killing except under restricted circumstances.

Note that the case of the stored embryos poses a very different ethical case to other forms of abortion in that the embryo to be terminated is in a test tube and not in the mother's body.

This removes all the arguments about a woman's rights over her own body from any discussion of abortion, since her own body is no longer involved, and not aborting the foetus does not impose an unwanted pregnancy upon the mother.

Defective or unsuitable embryos

Doctors are becoming more able to screen embryos for genetic abnormalities. In some cases the pregnancy may be terminated if a serious genetic defect is found.

Similarly doctors are able to screen artificially fertilised embryos in order to make sure that only healthy ones are implanted in the womb.

Both these examples raise abortion issues, but for many people the early stage of development at which the embryo is destroyed makes these issues seem less significant, probably because they don't regard the embryo as having acquired the status of a moral person at that stage.

However, such abortions are subject to criticism as undermining our attitude to people with disability.

For example, one organisation has argued:

And another argues:

If doctors were able to screen an embryo for trivial factors such as hair colour, or intelligence, and parents were able to abort an embryo because they only wanted a child of above-average intelligence, most people would regard this as morally unacceptable, and as a misuse of technology.