Tomorrow, MPs are voting on a bill to ban sex-selective abortion, and it looks very likely to go through. After all, this bill has certain mass appeal. Isn’t it terrible that baby girls are aborted? Isn’t it a feminist issue to stop that?
Of course it is, but not by whacking further restrictions on reproductive freedom. What we need to do is value girls. What we need to do is overturn patriarchy. What we need to do is a whole lot of fucking work, and it’s much easier for liberals to side with the womb-bothering creeps and restrict access to abortion.
The thing about abortion rights is we don’t need to agree with the choice being made. All we need to do is ensure that abortions happen safely, and this can only happen if the law allows it. Nobody should need to give a reason beyond “I don’t want to be pregnant any more, and I understand what this procedure entails”.
MPs are doing the exact opposite of this. They are playing on our racism to make it acceptable to restrict abortion rights for certain reasons.
If you have a little time today, try writing to or phoning your MP. Be loud about this in public, explain why you don’t agree with this invasive bill. Share links explaining why it is a bad idea. Make a lot of noise, because it’s our right to govern our own bodies freely that’s at stake here.
Another angry woman 
Before you can convince me something needs to be legislated against, you have to convince me that it is a big enough problem to warrent restricting rights. This completely fails to do so to the same scale that voter ID shit does: I honestly don’t feel there is enough of it happening, or at the VERY LEAST provably happening, to justify legal intervening.
My feeling is that the scope for this law is precisely to serve as a symbol of the value placed on women and girl’s lives. I’m far more sceptical about it’s ability to actually halt the number of sex selective abortions. I really strongly disagree that libertarianism about abortion is an effective counterbalance to the devaluation of female life, and the specific and direct coercion some women face to abort female children.
The idea of forcing parents to raise a girl that they clearly don’t want is chilling. I fear for the girls born into that life.
Keeping women as a sex and free labor caste requires a large population of undervalued women, a population that sex-selective abortion threatens. As the free labor and sex pool in a misogynist country (China, India) dwindles, the artificially low value placed on women’s work and lives comes under ever increasing strain. But rather than increasing women’s cultural value to something above zero to counter their ever-increasing scarcity, these countries try to perpetuate the Patriarchal status quo by ensuring the continued birth of countless women that no one values.
Banning sex-selective abortion is done to maintain gender inequality, not fight it.