On Feb 27, 2012, at 1:54 PM, Carl G. Estabrook wrote:
> "Frankly, I had thought that at the time Roe was decided, there was
> concern about population growth and particularly growth in
> populations that we don't want to have too many of."
> --Ruth Bader Ginsburg
> On Feb 27, 2012, at 12:39 PM, // ravi wrote:
>> On Feb 27, 2012, at 1:15 PM, Joseph Catron wrote:
>>> "The idea of sex-selective abortions is abhorrent ..."
>>> http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/feb/27/three-sons-sex-selective-family
>>>
>>> Umm, why, again?
Abhorrent or not, the decision is presumptively the decision of a woman.
To me, what is abhorrent is making a moral judgment about the reproductive decision of any woman, especially without the faintest notion of the individual circumstances that led her to make that decision.
From a social point of view, in an (at present) grossly overpopulated country like India suffering from an (at present) grossly excessive rate of population growth, female-selective abortion is by far and away the most practical way by which the people, on their own, can deal with that problem (given the fertility rate, the rate of population growth is a linear function of the reproductive-age sex ratio).
Historically, until the plague of Christianity with its lapinist ideology, female infanticide was the standard way in which the people of every society exerted control over their own reproduction and over the rate of population growth in their own society. I think we all can agree that female-selective abortion is quite preferable to that (as well as to totalitarian methods of population control like the Maoist "one-child" policy).
Male homosexuality, socially considered, is the proper response to the excess of reproductive-age males in any primate society where population limitation imposes a surplus of males or where younger males remain in the social group but cannot compete with the stronger adult males for the available females.
Shane Mage
"scientific discovery is basically recognition of obvious realities that self-interest or ideology have kept everybody from paying attention to"