Gender Based Abortion in Sweden

Just Politics..? has not waded into the issues of abortion but this article was disturing:

The Local reported in February that a woman from Eskilstuna in southern Sweden had twice had abortions after finding out the gender of the child.

The woman, who already had two daughters, requested an amniocentesis in order to allay concerns about possible chromosome abnormalities. At the same time, she also asked to know the foetus’s gender.

In China, where the number of children a woman can have is already governmnet controlled, it is common, upon the birth of a daughter, for her family to kill their baby because boys are more valued by families than girls are.  This has created a gender imbalance of 120 boys for every 100 girls:

“In eight to 10 years, we will have something like 40 to 60 million missing women,” U.N. resident coordinator Khalid Malik said.

Regarding Sweden, the article continues:

Doctors at Mälaren Hospital expressed concern and asked Sweden’s National Board of Health and Welfare (Socialstyrelsen) to draw up guidelines on how to handle requests in the future in which they “feel pressured to examine the foetus’s gender” without having a medically compelling reason to do so.

The board has now responded that such requests and thus abortions can not be refused and that it is not possible to deny a woman an abortion up to the 18th week of pregnancy, even if the foetus’s gender is the basis for the request.

To be sure, this is a very disturbing case.

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