Sex Selective Abortion Research Paper

The concept of prenatal screening for sex determination of a foetus is a highly debatable subject and poses many ethical arguments. In some countries like India and China, where sex selective abortion is common practice, pre-natal sex determination is illegal. The ethical issues that arise, limiting and promoting this practice, has driven me to strongly disagree that all countries should implement the example set by China and India to restrict sex determination – making it illegal for a physician to disclose the gender of an unborn foetus to an expectant mother. I will mainly discuss the limitations and problems that this practice creates with respect to Beauchamp and Childress bioethical principles. I will also discuss the ethical acceptability …show more content…
The limitations that legislation against prenatal screening and sex selective abortion pose on Beauchamp and Childress’s bioethics, reside in four main principles namely respect for autonomy – the norm of respecting the decision making capabilities of an autonomous person, nonmaleficence – the norm of avoiding causation of harm, beneficence – providing benefits of an action and the balancing of benefits against costs and risks and lastly justice – a group of norms distributing benefits, risks and related costs fairly. “Productive autonomy” refers to the mother’s individual right to know the gender of the foetus and terminate the pregnancy at her own choice, due to her decision making capacity. “The right of parental choice is paramount and should not be sacrificed to correct social inequality”. (Pg 15) It is also important to remember that physicians are not allowed to withhold information relative to the patient in question. Nonmaleficence is just a principle for a physician not to cause purposeful medical harm to a mother if she decides upon a sex selective abortion. Beneficence incurs the benefits of sex-selective abortion like decreased cost of having additional children if there is male-preference, effort that mother’s exert towards caring for children, prevent maternal neglect of unwanted gendered child and if her …show more content…
The practice seen in China and India offers a very paternalistic approach to the cultural gender preferences established in these countries and removes the aspect of autonomy and reproductive autonomy as discussed earlier and could be said that autonomy is ‘dictated by the state’ . A feminist philosopher Mary Anne Warren mentioned “a gendercide in China where an estimated 50 million women were ‘missing’”. I agree with Savulescu in saying that “sex selection is more likely to be harmful to women in Asia than in the West, he doubts whether it should be banned even there because unbalanced sex ratios may not be such a bad thing as it appears and the practice of sex selection for boys is not the cause but the product is ‘a false belief in the inferiority of women’” and that there is cultural preference and social acceptance of prenatal gender screening and sex-selective abortion leading to demographical problems only in very selective countries. For the sake of only a select few countries it would be ethically unacceptable to implement such a ban into countries where cultural-son preferences do not

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