Even among those who favor abortion rights, few advocate abortion simply because the mother (or father) does not want a girl. But in societies with powerful cultural preferences for boys, ultrasound sex determination followed by the abortion of female fetuses has become a familiar practice. In India, the number of girls per 1000 boys has dropped from 962 to 927 in the past two decades. India has banned the use of prenatal diagnosis for sex selection, but the law is rarely enforced. Itinerant radiologists with portable ultrasound machines travel from village to village, plying their trade. One Bombay clinic reported that, of 8000 abortions it performed, all but one were for purposes of sex selection (pp. 19-20).
To start, let's be very clear about what we are not discussing. We are not discussing abortion rights. We are not discussing the morality of sex selection. What we are discussing is how this particular example demonstrates the necessity of enforced community ethics: the right of society to tell you what to do.
In the example above, what's wrong with sex determination? Assuming the method used is moral, is there anything wrong with parents wanting one sex over the other? One friend desperately wanted a baby girl and tried 4 times for one. The result? Four boys! So what would really be so wrong about taking any moral steps available to ensure the desired sex of baby? In each individual case, the answer appears to be: not much.
This is especially true in cultures that favour one over the other. There can be, for example, a great many benefits to having a boy over a girl. A son will likely earn more money over the course of his lifetime, and thus be better able to provide for you. A son, in many cultures, is thought to bring more honour to the family. In many cases, a son is the only way to continue the family name. And so on. We can (and should) begrudge the cultural misogyny that is the basis of many of those benefits, but can we really begrudge an individual family simply for wanting such advantages?
The bigger problem, however, comes when we look at the issue on the societal level. While there may be a lot of benefits for individuals who have boy babies, there are a lot of cons for society as a whole when too many individuals avail themselves of that option. Some of these cons are specific: for example, it is well known that men are disproportionately responsible for violent crime; ergo, a society with significantly more men than women will likely experience more violent crime than a society with a balance of men and women (or even more women than men). That is a cost for society. A more basic problem though is the simple continuation of society. Obviously a society with insufficient women will inevitably suffer a declining birthrate, and as the problem compounds (i.e. if a higher percentage of even the declining birthrate is determined to be boys) society as a whole will simply run out of people. In other words, baby sex selection literally gives us the ability to select ourselves into extinction. That's a heck of a cost! Thus, when parents choose to have boy babies, they accrue benefits for themselves but incur costs for the rest of society.
That is an injustice, and that injustice is the grounds for enforced community ethics. In other words, society has the right to prevent you from making a choice that will unjustly detriment the rest of society. That sounds fine, on the surface, but the reason we took this example from today's reading is because of how beneficial the choice in question is for the individual. A live-and-let-live perspective on ethics is essentially an ethical version of the economist's "invisible hand of the market place." The economics version assumes that all the individual choices of individual buyers will cumulatively result in the right market corrections, e.g. no one person would choose to buy a bad product, therefore no one will buy bad products, resulting in bad products being selected out of the marketplace. The ethical version follows the same logic: as each individual makes good choices for them, the cumulative result will be good for society. What today's example shows, however, is that individual good can be opposed to the greater good: what's good for the goose is not necessarily good for the gander. All this is why, as a society, we have the right and need to tell you what to do with your life. And that's called ethics.
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