Sex selection: Consumer right or violence against women?
From this point of view, the issue is one of consumer choice and rights. That's how it's portrayed in a recent Los Angeles Times article about a federal lawsuit filed by more than 100 women against one of the several makers of such sex selection tests.
Or is sex selection a pressing social issue? That's how it's understood in much of the world. At the United Nations, Secretary General Ban Ki-moon has just announced that opposition to sex selection - which he describes as denying "countless" women "the right even to exist" - is part of a new 15-year UN campaign to end violence against women.
The UN has been raising alarms about sex selection since 1995. In a short video called Girls Gone Missing, the UN Population Fund says it "undermin[es] demographic balance and the human rights of women and girls" and explores its "long-term negative consequences for social, economic and gender parity."
Previously on Biopolitical Times: