Liberal Logic

According to this article, new technology allows women in America to determine the sex of their baby very early on, so that they can have a sex-selection abortion if they so choose.

Osagie K. Obasogie finds this to be a bad thing:

"Some prochoice advocates argue... 'if you believe women have the right to choose, [selecting sex] is a perfectly legitimate reason...' 'Subsuming an ostensible right to select sex under Roe's reproductive freedoms is as misguided as the Gender Mentor Kit's mistaking sex for gender.'"

He (she?) goes on to say that:

"To the extent that the Gender Mentor Kit does little outside of lending more slipperyness to the slope toward designer babies -- where a child's physical, emotional, and mental attributes are pieced together in a Frankensteinish manner -- we ought to think long and hard about whether 'mentoring gender' is a recipe for disaster."

Let's explain what the real issue is here:

Once you accept that the state cannot restrict access to abortion, at that point, selecting sex or any other characteristic become de facto a legitimate reason for an abortion. That is, if a woman wants an abortion, one cannot stop her on the grounds that her motivations are suspect. Put another way, once a woman can determine the sex of her baby during the window in which abortion is unrestricted, there exists no way of preventing her from aborting.

In essence, the only way to prevent sex selection is to prevent people from knowing the sex of their baby for as long as abortion is possible. So what Mr. Obasogie is implying, is that learning the gender of the baby should be restricted to prevent gender selection, as the abortion aspect cannot be.

In short, using abortion for sex selection ought to be illegal; but we can't have any restrictions on abortion, so let's ban learning the child's gender instead. This also mean that if abortion were legalized throughout all nine months of pregnancy, people could be banned from using ultrasound to determine gender.

This shows how liberalism often destroys one freedom (the right to learn your child's gender early) in the service of its dedication to "equality" and other forms of freedom.

That is all.