Ross Douthat has a thoughtful response to my post on sex-selective abortion, although I think he's mistaken in his conclusion:
This isn't an unusual situation. Every vision of human liberty requires tolerating certain evils in the name of individual rights, and there's nothing inherently wrong with erring on the side of freedom, and then trying ameliorate its side effects.
But some evils are more striking than others, and some definitions of liberty more dubious — and the graver the evil you're tolerating, the more likely that your philosophical premises have gone awry. Which is why the pro-life side is well within its rights to point out that the liberal West's current vision of human freedom bears responsibility for 160 million (and counting) missing girls.
There are a few problems I have with this. A society in which women are seen as such a monumental burden that mothers have a financial incentive to avoid having daughters isn't anything like "the liberal West's current vision of human freedom." The liberal West's version of human freedom is a society where women have agency, not merely where abortion is simply legal--although the latter is certainly a part of the former. It's very difficult to imagine "the liberal West" with billboards like the ones Michelle Goldberg wrote about cropping up in India in 1994, advertising ultrasounds with lines like "Spend 500 Rupees today and save 500,000 Rupees later." Perhaps India should outlaw ultrasounds?
The second thing is that abortion in India, as well as globally, is not so much the result of respect for women's rights as it is a legacy of panic about overpopulation. Birth control was a much more bipartisan cause during the Cold War when Republicans were concerned about overpopulation destabilizing countries and falling to communism. It's frustrating, but not terrible shocking that when the focus shifted to women's rights the issue became more controversial. As Goldberg writes in her chapter on India, "population control, divorced from an appreciable increase in women's status, replaced one demographic problem with another."
Making abortion illegal isn't likely to solve the problem either. Sex-selective abortion is already illegal. Dowry is already illegal. Making abortion illegal won't stop abortions, but it will probably increase the number of women who die trying to get them--or perhaps worse, in some cases it could lead to a return of parents actually killing their female children after they're born. Simply outlawing abortion would be like leeching someone with a gunshot wound. It's ultimately counterproductive to say that a phenomenon caused by women's lower social status can be solved by making it illegal for women to make decisions about when they have children.
As Goldberg writes in her book, in the "leftist" state of Kerala, with its "matriarchal traditions," sex-selective abortion made little headway despite availability of health care and family planning services. Long-term social change isn't as neat a solution as outlawing abortion, but it's the only one that actually stands a chance of working.
