Hello everyone! I haven’t mentioned this, but I couldn’t let the recent American House of Representative’s decision to not make sex-selective abortions illegal pass without comment.  Sheila Liaugminas has blogged on it in depth here, so I won’t talk much more about it. So instead I thought that I would link to the YouTube clip of Steven Mosher of the Population Research Institute (who we’ve blogged about before) testifying before a House subcommittee on sex-selective abortions. He makes the point that often women in certain ethnic communities (Indian, Chinese and Korean) are pressured into aborting girls by their families.  Sometimes this pressure takes the form of violence. Thus, the argument runs, making sex-selective abortion illegal would make it harder for this pressure to be brought to bear (or at least less likely that this pressure will succeed).  Indeed, Mosher uses the language of “choice” to defend the ultimately defeated bill – a nice piece of linguistic judo!

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