Keep Your Laws Off Of My Body And My Foetal Daughter's Body!

"I'm a Feminist and I want a boy so keep your paws out of my uterus!"

 

By Allison Pearson

In a children’s playground in Manhattan’s Central Park on a glorious, quickening spring Saturday, much like today, I was with my daughter by the climbing frame when a massed battalion of buggies came through the gates. The parents unleashed their precious cargo and a group of excited little girls swarmed towards us. It took me a few minutes to make sense of what I was seeing.

The parents were well-to-do New Yorkers in their forties or fifties, and all of them were white. The little girls had lustrous, dark hair, often chopped into a thick fringe, and adorable, intelligent brown eyes. They were perfect and beautiful. And they were rejects. Each and every one of them. Chucked on the garbage heap of life; either abandoned outside an orphanage or left to die. Casualties of China’s one-child policy, those little girls, adopted by Americans who had left conception too late, are the lucky ones. Increasing numbers of their sisters are not permitted to be born. As soon as foetuses are big enough to be scrutinised on a $12 ultrasound scan, and are found to be lacking the critical male appendage, they are aborted.

Thank heavens for little girls, they grow up in the most delightful way. Not everyone shares Maurice Chevalier’s enthusiasm, or is prepared to allow a female child to grow up at all.

Certainly not countries where boys are still needed to do hard physical labour or where only sons can inherit land. Or where boys are simply considered better. In Indian cities, the primitive village practice of killing unwanted, live female babies is frowned upon; aborting girls is seen as the civilised, modern alternative. In such societies, there are 120 boys for every 100 girls. Back in 1990, the economist Amartya Sen estimated that 100 million girls had “disappeared”. That figure is much higher today. They call it gendercide.

If such stories from nations with alien values and no established history of sexual equality are chilling, just imagine the idea that babies are being culled because of their gender in the UK today. Unbelievable. Horrifying. Yet, that is precisely what an undercover investigation by this newspaper has revealed – and today, shockingly, we learn that an expert believes the practice is “widespread”. I actually shouted aloud with dismay when I read the stories. A woman who was 12 weeks pregnant had an appointment with the Calthorpe Clinic and explained to a doctor that she and her partner wished to terminate the pregnancy because they “don’t want a girl”. A certain Dr Raj responded, “That’s not fair. It’s like female infanticide, isn’t it?” He then proceeded calmly to fill out a form for the abortion, casually giving a different reason to the mum and dad simply not fancying a baby girl. “I’ll put too young for pregnancy, yeah?”

Most appalling of all is that the doctor’s response proves he knows that what the woman is proposing is deeply wrong, even criminal, yet he happily suggests another reason to get the abortion done. It’s as though he were penning some excuse for a work sick-note, not aiding and abetting the disposal of a baby when the only thing “wrong” with it is it hasn’t got a willy.

In another clinic, NHS consultant Prabha Sivaraman was asked by a mum-to-be if illegal, sex-selection abortions were really available on demand. The woman said she thought she was having a girl, after a test in France, but she didn’t have actual proof. Was that a problem? “Oh, no,” replied Miss Sivaraman blithely, “we don’t ask questions. If you want a termination, you want a termination.”

And there we have it. A bald statement contradicting the law of the land, which says that abortion is only permissible if it threatens the mother’s health or if the foetus is severely disabled, has a distressing hereditary condition, and will have an appalling quality of life. The law certainly doesn’t say that you can extinguish your baby if it doesn’t go with your nursery’s blue wallpaper or if your husband’s always wanted a son, and you’ve got two girls already so, obviously, you don’t want another pink one. Because having a baby has become just another consumer choice, hasn’t it, and, well, the customer is always right. 

 

In the third world, unwanted baby girls 'disappear’. It’s called gendercide. And it’s happening in this country, too.

I support abortion, the procedure which President Bill Clinton said should be “safe, legal and rare”. Campaigners who describe themselves as “pro-life” seldom seem to ask what kind of life it is to which those unwanted foetuses they are so keen to save will be condemned. (I would have Baby P’s mother sterilised for starters.)

Yet, I must admit I grow ever more uneasy as I see abortion become not a regrettable, sad act of last resort, but just another form of contraception. Since 2002, 35,000 girls under 16 years of age have had a termination; in 2010, among the under-25s a quarter of abortions were repeat procedures. Indeed, in that same year, 34 per cent of all women ending pregnancies had had at least one previous abortion, up from 30 per cent a decade ago. In total, 85 women ended seven or more pregnancies. Over the past 40 years, there has been a 3,700 per cent increase in abortions, and this in the era of the reliable oral contraceptive pill. This is not what the 1967 Abortion Act was intended for. It’s not a womb valeting service, ladies.

So we really shouldn’t be a bit surprised if this particular slippery slope leads from guilt-free annual terminations – three for two, anybody? – to a “gender-balancing” service, which helps you plan the perfect family by vacuuming away infants of the wrong sex. There is a moral coarsening here that should concern us all. How desensitised have we become when an act of life or death – literally – is used as a tool to satisfy a curious desire to have one that you can dress in blue, as well as pink?

You can’t help but wonder whether if, in part, this could be down to the influence of the culture that brought us forced marriages turning a blind eye to another misogynistic horror, perhaps common in their homelands, but utterly abhorrent to the British way of life.

Indeed, in today’s paper, Vincent Argent, the former medical director of BPAS, the country’s largest abortion provider, tells a chilling tale that appears to confirm this. He said: “I’ve had a consultant colleague in the north of England who expressed a view – that consultant was from an ethnic minority –… he didn’t think [gender selection] was ethically wrong because he thought that the cultural reason why some communities may prefer to have four male babies is as good a reason as the, if you like, Anglo-Saxon cultural view of: 'Well I’m pregnant, I just don’t want it anyway’.”

Mr Argent also said that he had “no doubt” that women were terminating pregnancies because of the sex of the baby and he believed the “practice was fairly widespread”. 

I remember, more than a decade ago, doing a report on a hospital in London’s East End, and being told by a doctor that she now refused to disclose a baby’s sex when mothers arrived for their 20-week scan because there was such strong evidence that Asian couples were going away and aborting the girls. Undoubtedly, women in many communities are under monstrous pressure to produce sons. An Egyptian woman to whom I taught English had three heavenly small daughters; she wept when she told me that her husband would divorce her and take a new wife if she let him down again by producing another girl. 

Go back in our own history and you will find letters of commiseration to mothers who have been cursed with girls. In one 18th-century story, a wife reports to her husband: “Four months after you were gone, I was delivered of this Girl, but dreading your just resentment at her not proving the Boy you wished, I took her to a Haycock and laid her down.” Notice that the mother who abandoned her own infant considers her husband’s resentment of a mere daughter to be “just”. Notice also that the same author, one young Jane Austen, herself a lowly female, grew up to become the world’s best and wisest novelist, yet still shared the general prejudice of her age against newborn girls. 

  

Those who abort unwanted babies because of gender should feel the full force of the law.

At the start of the 21st century, it’s a different story: our girls are forging ahead in education and in every sphere of society. China preferred its boys and threw millions of girls on the rubbish tip or into the abortionist’s incinerator. More fool them. China and India now have a surplus of what they call “bare branches”, frustrated young men who will never meet a mate. (Good luck with that.) Meanwhile, those enchanting little reject girls I saw playing that day in Central Park will soon be colonising the universities, civilising and enriching every area they conquer and becoming terrific mums, too. No country can achieve its potential without the full and equal participation of its women. All the backward societies on earth repress and undervalue their girls and even murder those yearning to be born. 

The Telegraph undercover investigator changed her story with different doctors, claiming variously to be pregnant with an unwanted boy, and an unwanted girl – and was approved for terminations on both occasions. But there is little doubt that when such gendercide really occurs, it largely takes place against baby girls. For such a third-world act to be happening in our own country is unconscionable. We should direct the full force of the law against the doctors and clinics who are abusing their power and permitting babies to be terminated in this country for no cause except their gender. We won’t stand for it; you see, we’ve come a long way, baby.