Why the current campaigns against sex-selective abortion annoy me
Perhaps it's more-or-less a marketing thing, given that those campaigning for legal abortions argue it's a woman's right, but public campaigns against sex-selective abortion virtually always seem to assume that it's almost exclusively girls aborted as a result of sex-selection procedures. such an assumption reasonable?
Much of the evidence that Americans preferentially choose girls is anecdotal, as no larger body tracks gender selection procedures. But data from Google show that “how to have a girl” is searched three times as often in the United States as “how to have a boy.” Many fertility doctors say that girls are the goal for 80 percent of gender selection patients. A study published in 2009 by the online journal Reproductive Biomedicine Online found Caucasian-Americans preferentially select females through PGD 70 percent of the time. Those of Indian or Chinese descent largely chose boys.
(Source: Slate)
Similarly, this article notes that requests for girls amount account for ~66-75% of the use technologies such as MicroSoft to sort sperm in such a manner as to influence the gender of children concieved by filtering out other sperm.
Are girls being aborted due to their gender in North America? Such seems to be the case - at least to a certain extent in certain immigrant communities. At the same time, as I can't think of a great reason for gender-preferences to be reversed for different methods of sex selection, it doesn't seem too unreasonable to suggest it likely that girls only account for a minority of victims of such.