By Dave Andrusko
A growing alliance of resistance is developing against sex-selective abortions, made easy by the use blood tests that determine a baby’s sex early in pregnancy.
There are stories this week that the U.K. Labour Party is calling for a ban on sex-selective abortions. [here and here].
“Blood tests used to reveal a baby’s gender are leading to the abortion of unwanted girls in the UK, MPs and charities have warned,” Adam Forrest reported for The Independent. “Labour MP Naz Shah, shadow women and equalities minister, said the government must act now to stop the misuse of Non-Invasive Prenatal Test (NIPT) to abort pregnancies based on gender.” Shah added, “The government needs to look into this exploitative practice and enforce appropriate restrictions,” according to the Daily Sabah.
In theory at least, the National Health Service (NHS) “only “allows the blood test to screen for genetic condition. But the practice in private clinics, which are unregulated, is burgeoning and without limits.
Tan Dhesi, another Labour MP, told Forrest that “private clinics should not be allowed to advertise NIPT tests for gender determination.”
For its part, the Department of Health and Social Care, through a spokesman, said only that the government would “continue to review the evidence” on NIPT testing in the UK.
NIPT and the Slippery Slope
As the Society for the Protection of Unborn Children (SPUC) explained last year, NIPT is a blood test
which can detect genetic conditions as well as sex and other traits, will be offered to expectant mothers to screen for Down syndrome, Patau’s and Edwards’ syndromes if doctors already fear their baby has a higher than average risk from this year.
It was approved for use on the National Health Service (NHS) in October 2016, despite the concerns of medics and campaigners that it would lead to an even higher percentage of babies with Down syndrome and other genetic conditions being aborted.
The two-fold concern, thus, was and is that the test would never, could never be limited to cases of suspected genetic anomaly and would quickly result in more and more sex-selective abortions, especially in cultures where males are much preferred to females.
For example Shah told Forrest that the
preference for boys among some ethnic minority communities in the UK was “forcing (women) to adopt methods such as NIPT to live up to expectations of family members.”
Forrest noted that an investigation
found “thousands” of pregnant women using online forums to discuss the discovery of their baby’s gender through NIPT testing.
Rani Bilkhu, the founder of Jeena International, a charity supporting women from ethnic minority communities in the UK, added
“No wonder they’re resorting to sex-selection abortion because they’ve got no choice. …They don’t want to be homeless, they don’t want their marriage to fail – all because they couldn’t give birth to a boy.”
said some women were forced into abortions because they became pregnant with a girl for a second or third time.
The Daily Sabah noted that preference for boys is a global issue “with China and India already taking action to introduce legislation banning sex-selective abortions.”
Experts are concerned that the U.K.’s allowance of gender tests could turn the country into a haven for abortion-seekers, and call for the tests to be banned in private clinics as well.
Tom Shakespeare of the Nuffield Council on Bioethics, a government advisory body, warned, “if we allow it, people will come here as tourists.”