So now we can all go buy a baby gender predictor kit. Yes folks, that's right, for only 35 of your hard-earned American Dollars, you can pee in a cup and determine with 78 to 8
0% accuracy whether to buy frilly pink or sporty blue baby gear.Call me old-fashioned, call me romantic, but there is something rather special about finding out who your baby is right after (s)he emerges.
But this test could be a good thing. Maybe it would decrease the number of babies exposed to ultrasound radiation. No? Oh, the manufacturers suggest a follow-up sonogram. Perhaps the 78-80% efficacy is a ploy and if the test were more accurate no follow-up would be needed.
Of course anti-choicers are up in arms, proclaiming this will only lead to a wave of gender-selected abortions. But think about it: the test is only accurate at 10 weeks after conception, or 12 weeks of pregnancy as dated by the last menstrual period (LMP). You can only procure a first-trimester abortion until 16 weeks LMP. That's not a very big window of time.
Widespread gender-based eugenics is going to have to wait a little longer for its heyday.
(Not to mention all the orphaned Chinese girls.)
2 comments:
wow
how insensitive-baby girls in India and China are being SLAUGHTERED just because their girls. As a feminist, shouldn't that make you mad? It really pisses me off. I have 4 girls and it just cuts me to the heart to think anyone would kill a baby girl. And the fact that in China women don't have a choice under the one-child policy. If you're pro choice, shouldn't you be FOR both choices? Oh, wait, choice is code for abortion, I forgot. And In India women are terrorized by their mothers-in law if they are pregnant with a girl, and often forced to abort, or be kicked out. Wake up and snap out of the rhetoric.
I didn't mean to be insensitive, I was being sarcastic about the gender-eugenics thing. I apologize if it came off as heartless.
I too am horrified by gender-selective abortion, infanticide, abandonment, being sold into slavery or prostitution...just because they're female and thus less valuable.
Having said that, I don't see North American society perpetrating widespread gender-selection and I don't think this test kit will change that trend, as some have postulated. Our devaluation of the feminine tends to be less overt.
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