British Indians still aborting baby girls in UK

Sorry! That was in reply (agreement) to foxie48's Mon 29-Dec-25 08:50:15 post.

'rage ' headlines, that's exactly what it is.

Deliberately selecting certain negative aspects of a culture to critique the whole culture, which is happening to some extent above, is racist.

I'm not saying any specific post here is so, but we are definitely swimming in those waters when we call out that (in this case) small aspect of another culture and ignore the many failings in ours on treatment of girls and women

Morris dancing gets its name from the Spanish word 'morisco', and the form may have been imported from the continent.
Good to see that we are happy to absorb other cultures into our own.
The participants used to be in 'blackface' for some reason, now lost to history.

I am not raging and very rarely read msm, like many people.

Oreo

Hmm, wonder what any poster dislikes about our own culture here in the UK that is somehow worse than aborting healthy baby girl babies, forced marriages, honour killings or other known ethnic abhorrent practices? Just be glad that our own culture has nothing worse than Morris Dancing.

This comment only works by selecting extreme examples from one group and trivial examples from another. That’s a rhetorical choice, not an objective comparison!

Serious crimes exist across all communities; the difference is whether we treat them as crimes to be dealt with, or as tools to generalise about millions of people. The quoted post talks about an issue in a vague, generalised way, using symbolic terms instead of concrete, real-world facts and people.

Abstraction replaces reality with symbols. Reality tends to be less convenient for outrage and it appears that on GN many are just looking for that outrage opportunity.

My MIL only wanted girls. My husband is called Jonathan because she had only chosen the name Joanna. How differently he and his elder sister were brought up was shocking. Sometimes he wouldn't even get a birthday card yet she would get hundreds of pounds of gifts every birthday and Christmas. She paid the deposit on her first home and furnished it, paid for all her holidays, cars etc....If ever questioned my MIL would say, " But I didn't want a son I wanted daughters." When we told her I was pregnant with my first child she looked at the sky and held her hands in prayer position and said, "Please let it be a girl." At the 20 week scan on discovering it was a boy she told me to have an abortion. And before my son was even born she asked if I was considering a second baby and when I said I always presumed I would have 2 children she replied, " Thank goodness there's still chance that one will be a girl."

DaisyAnneReturns

Sorry! That was in reply (agreement) to foxie48's Mon 29-Dec-25 08:50:15 post.

Yes, even the ambition and hard work ethic of many ethnic minority groups is used against them. They can't win in some people's eyes.

Good post DAR.
Bukkie, that was awful for you.

I think there is a discussion about the fact that abortion will of course lead to instances where sex ( or race presumbably) is a reason for abortion. It may be that is the price we pay for abortion. I completely opposed the new legislation with regard to abortion as I thought the price was too high. It depends what'cost' we are comfortable with.

How many healthy babies are aborted by non Asians. I've said about someone I worked with who had one rather than mess her holiday up, I also knew someone who had an abortion as she thought she might get divorced and a teenager who wasn't sure if she'd had sex and if so was it consensual. No idea who the father was, probably the guy she was dancing and flirting with at a club. Anyway an abortion sorted "it" out.

Before you could buy pregnancy tests I had a test at the BPAS, turned out negative but before we knew I had to see a counsellor who not only advised me to have an abortion but pressured me to.

We aren't a culture to lecture about abortion.

We are a culture to discuss womens rights though, something which happens on here time and time again, particularly in relation to America.

It was many years ago, but I still remember reading a birth announcement that read, ‘To X and Y, a fifth and final daughter.’

I felt so sorry for that poor little baby.

To those of us who didn't care if we had girls or boys it's hard to comprehend having an abortion based on sex of the foetus.

That said, I expect it was important historically when only male offspring were able to inherit etc.

We know the practice has plateaued over the last couple of years - but thankfully the general trend is downward.

As it is changing in India it will, presumably,go down here soon too.

Kandinsky

This won’t be a popular answer - but better to abort an unwanted pregnancy than bring a child into the world to be hated & possibly abused.

To be honest Kandinsky I'm with you on that!

I agree Galaxy(10.12).

Generalisations about supposed, unproven generalisations just dilute & shut down debate. As does drawing comparison between between different cultures' approach.

The only moral high ground for me is if a practice, wherever it originates, causes pain & suffering that's sufficient to highlight it in general debate with a view to stop the suffering.

theworriedwell

How many healthy babies are aborted by non Asians. I've said about someone I worked with who had one rather than mess her holiday up, I also knew someone who had an abortion as she thought she might get divorced and a teenager who wasn't sure if she'd had sex and if so was it consensual. No idea who the father was, probably the guy she was dancing and flirting with at a club. Anyway an abortion sorted "it" out.

Before you could buy pregnancy tests I had a test at the BPAS, turned out negative but before we knew I had to see a counsellor who not only advised me to have an abortion but pressured me to.

We aren't a culture to lecture about abortion.

That's what I was getting at upthread. There are some reasons for abortion I find uncomfortable, but the choice is always going to be stark - do we allow abortion because a pregnant woman wants one, or do we not? There is a sort of middle ground, which is that we allow it for reasons that others see as reasonable, whether or not the objections are shared by the pregnant woman. That's not really a middle ground at all, though - it relies on subjectivity and 'ethics', as defined by people who will not be affected by the results of their decisions about others.

Anyone can get high minded about things that don't affect them, but equally, nobody can really see into the mind of another, so banning abortion as a means of sex-selection but allowing it for other reasons is never going to work. Fifty years ago, maternal unmarried status might have been seen as an acceptable reason to terminate - is that more or less acceptable than doing so because of the baby's sex? Who's to say?

I could list reasons that I think would make abortion acceptable to me, but my list might be different from yours, or from the list of the baby's father - or crucially, it might be different from that of the woman carrying the baby. I believe that she is the one who has to decide, and I also believe that challenging the thinking behind decisions like that is preferable to banning, however much I may disapprove of them. The alternative is going to be unwanted babies or mistreated mothers. Whether the mistreatment is at the hands of Indian fathers, Irish nuns, social workers or anyone else is immaterial.

Abortion on the grounds of gender is illegal in this country.
It is the law, but there seems to be a growing culture to circumvent the law because of 'cultural differences.' Two-tier
policing?
Reinforcing British values, and stopping an outdated culture which castigates and punishes women for producing a female child when it is the father who determines the sex, are what is necessary.

Yes that ethical decision has already been made.
Of course enforcing that law when you have legal abortion is almost impossible I would imagine.

If you read the article and compare it to the statistical evidence, there's clear bias in the article and no actual hard evidence that girls are being aborted because of their sex. If they are, it's clearly illegal but that's not what the stats actually prove.

eazybee

Abortion on the grounds of gender is illegal in this country.
It is the law, but there seems to be a growing culture to circumvent the law because of 'cultural differences.' Two-tier
policing?
Reinforcing British values, and stopping an outdated culture which castigates and punishes women for producing a female child when it is the father who determines the sex, are what is necessary.

Do you think that it is only women of Indian descent who abort their babies because they are not their preferred sex? Unfortunately I don’t. People have abortions for myriad reasons, and I don’t doubt that choice of sex is one for some women of all cultures. It’s horrible to think about I know.

If someone presents herself to a doctor asking for a termination, how is s/he supposed to know whether the reason is, as she may say, that her mental health would suffer if she continued the pregnancy, or if her reason is that she doesn't want a female baby? Both could be true at once, or it could be one or the other. Are doctors supposed to treat women from particular ethnic backgrounds differently on the off chance that a decision has been made for the wrong reason? That, to me, would be very wrong, and may even be illegal in itself, on the grounds of race discrimination.

Also, maybe a bit tangental, but are there illnesses that pass down the female line that would allow pregnancies to be terminated if female and continued if male? If so, that means that sex-based terminations are not actually illegal. Or I suppose it could be seen as 'two-tier' if you want to use a tabloid phrase.

We obviously do 'act' in certain ways depending on culture, the advice given to professionals around fgm for example relates to specific cultures.
I think if you have abortion laws as we do in this country then there is very little you can do to enforce the law around abortion and sex selection.

Since abortion on grounds of which sex the baby is, is illegal here you wonder what lies these pregnant women are telling GP’s.
The women will be married so what, other than they don’t wish to have any more children can they say ? What if it’s their first baby?
It’s a shocking and terrible thing to do, to abort your healthy child because it’s a girl.😢

Years ago I worked in the NHS in a high Asian populated area. There was a notice in the Antenatal ultrasound area , it stated that “you will not be informed of the sex of your baby at this scan” Nowadays it would not be so easy to keep to this as the scans are much clearer and the patient can often see . My SiL was told she was having a boy at her scan much to her delight after two girls - wrong !!