Abortion

A sad irony now confronts the feminists who fought so hard and so long to make abortion on demand legally available: Abortion is increasingly being used to end the life of healthy unborn infants just because they are not of the sex their parents prefer. And almost all of the unborn babies being aborted for no reason except that they are of an unwanted six are female.

This ultimate discrimination against females is expected to increase rapidly in the next few years. Cheap and highly accurate methods of learning the sex of unborn infants early in pregnancy will become widely available in one to two years. These methods will replace the complex and expensive techniques now required for the purpose. Couples willing to resort to abortion will then find it easy to produce only sons or daughters in the precise order they desire.

Girls Plot Wanted

There is every indication already that such prospective parents-from well educated Americans to Third World peasants-do not want girls, at least not until after one or more boys.

Sex is determined at the instant of conception by whether the ovum (with its female X chromosome) is first penetrated by a sperm with an X or a male Y chromosome. An ejaculation contains millions of each kind of sperm.

Every cell in the body of the newly conceived child will then have the female XX pattern or the male XY blueprint. It is relatively easy to determine whether a cell has XX or XY cLamosomes. The difficulty in he past has been to obtain cells from the unborn baby to examine.

Now it's done by amniocentesis, a technique developed to detect and treat Rh disease before birth, and now used to diagnose Down's syndrome and about 70 other genetic disorders. Amniocentesis can't be done until about the thirteenth week of pregnancy and requires inserting a needle into the uterus of the pregnant woman to withdraw fluid surrounding the unborn infant for testing. The fluid contains cells sloughed off from the baby.

Chinese scientists have developed a new method of obtaining fetal cells from the placenta by means of a cervical smear, almost as simple as a Pap test. So far it's only 80% to 90% accurate, compared to 99% for amniocentesis. But it can be done as early as seventh or eighth week of pregnancy, when a first trimester abortion is still a possibility.

 

Still another new method locates and tests fetal white blood cells in the mother's blood stream. Both techniques are expected to be easily available here within a few yeas

Not much further into the future are improved ways to tilt the odds of conceiving a child of the desired sex by artificially handicapping either the X- or the Y-bearing sperm in the race toward the ovum. Theoretically, this is possible because of the infinitesimally small differences in the weight, mobility, and life span of the X and Y sperm.

Possibilities include diaphragms that permit passage of only Y-bearing sperm, spermicidal creams that would kill either X or Y sperm, and separating the two types of sperm by electrophoresis and using the desired kind for artificial insemination. Abortion would backstop failures.

Ugly Predictions

So sure are some scientists that sex selection of children will soon be widespread that they are worrying with psychologists and sociologists about how it will affect the world. Almost everyone. agrees that most parents will opt for boys, at least at first.

In the most hopeful views of the selected-sex world, parents will also choose to have a girl later on then stop with the idealized two-child family, reducing the birthrate. This family pattern, psychologists say. lucks males into typical first-child leadership patterns, with females typecast as second-place followers from infancy on.

In uglier predictions, couples continue to prefer boys to girls, knocking the male-female balance permanently askew and resuing in a male-dominated world with more violence, wars, and homosexuality and in serious disruption of traditional family life. Women might become little more than queen ants, useful chiefly for sex and reproduction.

Its a Pandora's box of potential trouble•-and it was abortion, with the insistence on the legal right to eliminate human beings unwanted for any reason, that opened the lid first.