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Up to 4,700 females “missing” because of sex-selection abortions in England and Wales

Jan 16, 2014

 

By Dave Andrusko

An investigative story that ran this week in the British newspaper The Independent added additional fuel to the simmering debate over sex-selection abortion.

Written by Science Editor Steve Connor the investigation of data from the 2011 National Census concludes that “The practice of sex-selective abortion is now so commonplace that it has affected the natural 50:50 balance of boys to girls within some immigrant groups and has led to the ‘disappearance’ of between 1,400 and 4,700 females from the national census records of England and Wales.”

This conclusion is directly at odds with a government investigation last year that “found no evidence that women living in the UK, but born abroad, were preferentially aborting girls,” Connor wrote. However, Connor argues, the widespread discrepancies in the sex ratio of children in some immigrant families “can only be easily explained by women choosing to abort female foetuses in the hope of becoming quickly pregnant again with a boy.”

He adds, “The findings will reignite the debate over whether pregnant women should be legally allowed to know the sex of their babies following ultrasound scans at 13 weeks.”

The Independent summarized its five main findings:

There is strong evidence that the overall gender ratio is significantly different from the background ratio in the case of UK parents born in Afghanistan, Pakistan and Bangladesh.

There is strong evidence that the gender ratio of the second child is significantly biased in favour of boys in the case of Afghanistan and Pakistan.

There is some evidence that the gender ratio of the second child is significantly biased towards boys for parents born in Nepal, India and Bangladesh.

There is some evidence that the overall gender ratio of the second and third child is significantly biased in favour of boys for parents born in Afghanistan, Pakistan, India and Bangladesh.

As NRL News Today has reported in prior stories, there was a furor late last year in Great Britain over the decision of the Crown Prosecution Service not to prosecute two abortionists who were willing to abort female babies, not because there wasn’t sufficient evidence, but because prosecution would not be in the “public interest.”

This astonishing conclusion followed a 19-month investigation spurred by the uncover work of The Daily Telegraph that demonstrated beyond dispute there are abortionists who will abort a child because the mother says she does not want a girl.

Sex-selection abortions are technically illegal under the 1967 Abortion Act. But even as protests mounted, pro-abortionists calmly pointed out that under the 1967 Abortion Act, abortion is legal when two doctors agree that “the continuance of the pregnancy would involve risk, greater than if the pregnancy were terminated, to the physical or mental health of the woman or any existing children of her family.”

Under this expansive/flexible language, while sex-selection abortions are not legal per se, they are if the doctors say the “risk” of a woman having a female baby is “greater than if the pregnancy were terminated.”