It is shocking that even now, in the 21st Century, sex-selection abortions are happening in the United States. Unborn baby girls are discriminated against, as many Asian-American women are pressured to produce a son to continue the family name.
In 2015, New York state Assemblyman Marco Crespo sponsored a bill that would ban sex-selective abortion in the state, according to Straus Media. This bill is currently on hold, yet it brings to light the real concern that females are selectively aborted.
An example of this appalling use of sex-selection is found in the city of Brooklyn. A recent unscientific street survey of dozens of Chinese women between the ages of 23 and 50 in Manhattan’s Chinatown and Flushing found that many women seek abortion in desperation to fulfill their family’s expectations, the report states.
Rohini Prabha Pande, an independent consultant with the World Bank and the International Center for Research on Women, explained that sex-selective abortion is often not the mother’s choice.
“First, women who want to keep the baby are often forced to abort; while on some other occasions, women who want to keep the baby but agree on or even initiate the abortion, because they understand that they will be looked down on if not,” Pande said.
Pande went on to describe the social pressure placed on women: “When immigrants relocate to a new country but still live in an area together, it’s essentially like back home. The social norms can take generations to disappear, and we oftentimes underestimate the power of this kind of social pressure.”
One woman told reporters her story:
“It’s a girl,” said the doctor. “You want to get rid of it? It’ll take just three minutes.”
Lily Zhou trembled — her motherly instincts tinged with lament. “It’s my daughter, it’s a life,” she recalled thinking. “I can’t do this.”
And, according to the mother of four from Brooklyn, her experience is not an uncommon one within the city’s gynecological clinics. “Most of my friends would either go to Chinatown or Flushing for this,” she said.
Pregnant women, most of them Chinese and Indian, often go to abortion clinics for early stage fetal gender tests. If the fetus is found to be female, another procedure — abortion — sometimes also takes place, according to interviews with dozens of physicians, community leaders and Asian immigrants in Manhattan’s Chinatown, Queens’ Flushing and Jackson Heights and Brooklyn’s Sunset Park.
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Like many of her friends, Zhou tested her baby’s sex each time she conceived. Unlike others she knows, she said, Zhou never had an abortion. She now has three girls and a 1-year-old son, her youngest child.
She had not planned on having this many children. “After my first girl, we began to expect a boy,” Zhou, 34, said.
She came to New York in her early 20s from Fujian, a province in southeastern China. She now runs a Chinese takeout restaurant with her husband in Flatbush, Brooklyn. “We don’t have a preference for boys,” Zhou said. “We just wanted a boy to make it more of a perfect family.”
In Zhou’s case and many others, mothers-in-law are especially hard on the expectant mothers, as they grew up in a male driven society, said Manhattan gynecologist Dr. Lisa Eng. The elderly still view the son as the one who continues the family line and brings back a paycheck. A daughter, on the other hand, simply is married off, thus contributing little to the family.
Betty Rose Green, a manager at the New York Asian Women’s Center, told the news outlet that she helps many abused women from South Asian countries who say they are being forced into a sex-selection abortion.
“These women were ridiculed or abused in their families” because they did not have sons, Green said. “Their husbands listen to their in-laws.”
Sex-selection is only banned in seven states, yet pro-life feminists continue to work to safeguard unborn girls from abortion. As molecular biologist Rebecca Taylor stated in a prior LifeNews article, “It is past time for America to say loud and clear that we will not permit the killing of innocents simply because they lack the y chromosome.”
