Foetus sex tests spark UK alarm

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Britain has started investigation into latest revelations that sex-selective abortions, which are illegal in the country, were openly available to patients. Britain’s health secretary Andrew Lansley, who described sex selection as ‘illegal and morally
Wrong’, ordered an inquiry into revelations published in the Daily Telegraph.

“I’m extremely concerned to hear about these allegations. Sex selection is illegal and is morally wrong. I’ve asked my officials to investigate this as a matter of urgency,” he said.

A covert investigation by the newspaper has revealed that British clinics were willing to terminate fetuses purely because they are either male or female. The clinics were also prepared to falsify paperwork toarrange the abortions despite these procedures being illegal.

The investigation revealed that doctors were readily offering to arrange terminations after being told the women did not want to continue with the pregnancy because of the gender of the unborn child.

One of the doctors covertly filmed by undercover reporters with pregnant women is of Indian origin. Prabha Sivaraman, who works for private clinicsand NHS hospitals in Manchester, was filmed offering an illegal sex-selection abortion.

The trend towards choosing boys over girls, through sex-selective abortions, has increasingly been documented with evidence amongst Asian diasporas in Britain, the United States and Canada. Sex-selective abortions are common in emerging economies like India and China. In India, the number of boys born for every 100 girls was last year estimated to be 109.5 and in China the number was 121.

The natural sex ratio at birth is 105 boys born for every 100 girls. Oxford University researcher Sylvie Dubuc in 2007 had documented in collaborative research a male biased sex ratio at birth among Indian immigrants in the UK.

Dr Dubuc is now working on a project about pre-natal sex-selection techniques to estimate the full extent of sex-selection against females in the UK and identify groups most at risk of resorting to sex-selection and its impact on the society.

Even newer technologies like sperm sorting and pre-implantation genetic diagnosis are used to provide additional ways to select sex, according to the Centre for Genetics and Society in the United States, where the use of sex selection technology is unregulated.

The evidence of sex-selective abortions being available in Britain has now led the anti-abortion groups to speak out against the easy availability of access to abortion. “This investigation confirms the reality of eugenics in modern British medicine, in which some innocent human beings are deemed too inconvenient to be allowed to live.

Sex-selective abortion is an inevitable consequence of easy access to abortion, a situation to which the proabortion lobby has no convincing answer,” Society for the Protection of Unborn Children group’s communications manager Anthony Ozimic said.