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Some issues here, be ready to talk about what is missing, Pol

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Some issues here, be ready to talk about what is missing, Pol

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Did you maybe write this without looking at the evaluated sources here?

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This article sets out the women's rights arguments that, in certain circumstances, favour abortion.

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Source 5: The Guardian Selective Abortions

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Source 5: The Guardian Selective Abortions

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The claim that doctors in the UK have been caught agreeing to conduct sex-selective abortions is extremely shocking - but certainly not surprising. At a time when doctors are becoming more and more interventionist in fertility rites - even creating designer babies on demand through assisted reproduction - why would the sex be left out? And if there is a deeply negative social impact of these abortions, they appear unaware of it.

Maintaining that they are merely being sensitive to their clients, doctors say they are responding to a need, even if the solution (sex-selective abortions) is illegal. In an apparent display of empathy, ethics are buried under the easy money charged. But if, as has happened elsewhere in the world, there is an inbuilt parental bias from certain communities for a child of a particular sex - this can lead to a dangerous gender imbalance. That doctors can break the law and not realise that their decision could rip up the very fabric of family life is very, very disturbing.

This is exactly the sort of behaviour that was noticeable in India in the 1980s among doctors who, very sympathetically, allowed women to abort baby girls - and keep the male child. This has meant that over 30 million girls are missing in India today - leading to a completely skewed gender ratio.

While researching my book on female foeticide and infanticide, I met some Asian families in the UK and discovered that they still carried the cultural baggage of the "male child preference". One young, working, British woman of Indian origin told me that, as a teenager, her father had asked her to look after her sister, while he took her mother for a sex-selective abortion. He did not want a third daughter in the house. The young woman's trauma was considerable, as she and her sibling felt they were the unwanted sex - but that was of no consideration to her father.

How is it possible that every time doctors perform sex-selective abortions they don't realise the immeasurably costly consequences - both emotional as well as social?

Recently, in India, the poignant case of a battered two-year-old girl, Falak, grabbed the headlines. The baby, who had been brutally bitten, burnt and grievously wounded, became a shameful representation of a growing problem that the country has ignored for years: the neglect and maltreatment of girls, not just by men, but by women as well.

Baby Falak now lies with broken arms and legs in India's most prestigious government hospital in Delhi, undergoing her fourth brain surgery - and there is very little hope that she will ever fully recover. In a country that still practises female foeticide and infanticide, her story opened up the shocking dimensions that the growing gender imbalance has led to. After all, if a country continues to kill its baby girls, there can never be any real respect or security for its women, at any age.

With many more men than women in India, it is not surprising that there has been a steady rise in the instances of violence against women, both young and old - including heinous crimes like rape and acid attacks. The trafficking of women as well - the buying of brides - has also become a profitable business.

In fact, when Falak's story was investigated, it was found that her mother, Munni, had been forced to abandon her by two "agents" who promised her a better life. The agents presented Munni (the mother of three children) herself as a prospective "virginal" bride to a man who had been unable to get married due to the increasing shortage of women. As the story has unravelled, it has become clear that the impact of the gender imbalance has been thus far exploited by everyone for their own advantage - and even women (such as the two agents) are party to it. Few corrective measures have been taken - and few are, perhaps, even possible.

The tragedy is, just as not a single doctor in India who helped pregnant women get rid of their girl children will ever be held accountable for what has become an enormous social problem, it is doubtful if any UK doctors will ever feel a twinge of guilt over sex-selective abortion either, regardless of the consequences.

* Follow Comment is free on Twitter @commentisfree
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Society needs to realise the horrific consequences of sex-selective abortions | Kishwar Desai

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The claim that doctors in the UK have been caught agreeing to conduct sex-selective abortions is extremely shocking - but certainly not surprising. At a time when doctors are becoming more and more interventionist in fertility rites - even creating designer babies on demand through assisted reproduction - why would the sex be left out?

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What is the exact title? Please can you put it as the title of this padlet, Polina? 

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What is the exact title? Please can you put it as the title of this padlet, Polina? 

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And be aware it can't just be descriptive, you need to make it discursive, argumentative (see examples on the step by step guide on Study Smart/our class padlet)

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Diane Munday didn't know what an abortion was until she was in her early twenties. But the need to quickly and safely terminate a pregnancy became a very personal reality for her when she sought out an abortion in 1961, while it was still illegal in the UK. Six decades later at the age of 86, she has made an indelible mark on British society as a pioneering campaigner for women's rights.

"It was illegal. People were sent to prison for having and carrying out abortions. It was never a word that was said. But having an abortion was a common experience for many. But I didn't even know what it was to think about it," she tells The Independent.

Munday was first confronted with the stark reality of abortions when her local dressmaker - a common profession in the Sixties - suddenly died. The young woman's mother quietly confided in Munday's mother that she had lost her life after having a backstreet abortion. But what caused her death was never spoken about publicly. To this day, Munday doesn't know how the dressmaker died.

"It was never talked about. All I knew was that she died," she says.

The dressmaker was one of an estimated 100,000 women in the UK who were forced to seek out an unsafe, illegal abortion, before the Abortion Act 1967 came into force.

"Women would drink bleach to try to induce miscarriage. They would have very hot baths, or move heavy furniture, or try to do it themselves with a needle or a crochet hook," says Munday.

As a result, an underground network of backstreet abortionists ran quietly across the country. Some of them, says Munday, became involved by force. It was no unknown for women who had carried out abortions for their close friends and family to be blackmailed by desperate pregnant women who threatened to report them to the police if they didn't help them, too. Like women who had abortions, those who carried out the procedure illegally could be sent to prison.

"These people were unskilled. Some might have had a bit of nursing experience or had worked in a hospital, or carried out procedures for a friend or daughter," says Munday.

The shame attached to having an abortion meant that, like the dressmaker, women's deaths were covered up. To save grieving families from being questioned by the police, doctors would lie on death certificates, stating instead that women died of miscarriages. And hospitals would draft in extra staff on Fridays in A&E departments across the UK to deal with the influx of women being harmed by abortions they sought out on payday.

After the tragic death of the dressmaker, Munday put abortion to the back of her mind. Until she got married and had three children in less than four years. When she fell pregnant with a fourth child in 1961, she simply couldn't fathom having another baby. Luckily for Munday, she was wealthy enough to visit a Harley Street physician in London who agreed to diagnose her as mentally unfit to have another child: a privilege she acknowledges simply wasn't an option for poorer women. The procedure - which would nowadays cost thousands of pounds - was carried out quickly and safely under general anaesthetic. Realising how lucky she was to be alive, Munday pledged to fight for abortion to be legalised. She would go on to become the general secretary and vice-chair of the Abortion Law Reform Association.

As Munday braved being ostracised by her community to campaign for abortion rights, she was surprised by how people responded. Most people, she found, supported her.

"One of my first experiences of going out and speaking about abortion was at a local Townswomen's Guild meeting. In the tea break woman came up to me one after another to tell me they had an abortion. They would say 'I've never told anyone before but I had an abortion during the depression in the '30s' or 'we couldn't afford another child so I had an abortion'."

But the red paint splatted across her car, which she was told symbolised the blood of children she had murdered, proved that legalising abortion would be tough.

"Some people shunned me publicly. A shop in the village refused to serve me because the shop-keeper said it was tainted money and accused me of doing abortions on the kitchen table."

That vocal minority continues to stand in the way of progression, argues Munday.

And asked to describe the stigma attached to abortion in the 1960s, Munday is quick to answer: "there still is stigma." That's despite the fact that one in three women will seek out an abortion, and 95 per cent will not regret it.

"I'm very sad that women still feel the stigma. I think this has been one success of the fanatical anti-abortion lobby in this country. With their talk of women murdering their babies they've made women who feel it's all right to have an abortion feel that it's not. But it isn't something to be ashamed of."

Now, the octogenarian remains vocal and committed to seeing abortion laws modernised. Despite being a nation ahead of the curve in legalising abortion, Munday says the UK's laws are now archaic compared with the rest of Europe as two doctors must give their permission before a woman can have the procedure. She looks towards Canada and northern states of Australia, where abortion has been decriminalised, as examples to follow.

"I've always believed that it should be a woman's decision to have an abortion. I find the current laws appalling. We need to give women the power, not two doctors who might have never seen the woman before, will probably never see her again and know nothing about her life.

"In the 1960s, it was the best we could get. But the laws should have been changed sooner. 50 years ago if anyone had told me that I'd still be campaigning now I'd say they were stupid."

To Munday, valuing life and giving women easy access to abortions are inextricably linked.

"People are too important to be born willy nilly because someone the contraceptive broke or because they had unprotected sex. It is irresponsible to bring a person into the world just because they have been conceived."

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The horrific reality of having an illegal abortion in the 1960s

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Diane Munday didn't know what an abortion was until she was in her early twenties. But the need to quickly and safely terminate a pregnancy became a very personal reality for her when she sought out an abortion in 1961, while it was still illegal in the UK.

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Historical abortion statistics, United Kingdom

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Definition of table data (see notes after table for additional information):

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May I starts writing, or is this not suitable?

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What are the effects of the Abortion Law 1967 in the UK? 

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What are the effects of the Abortion Law 1967 in the UK? 