A New Study Demolishes the Racist Myths Behind Sex-Selective Abortion Bans

Surprise! The “pro-women” bans are just another way to block abortion rights.

Fuse/Thinkstock

Fight disinformation: Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily newsletter and follow the news that matters.


Last year, when lawmakers across the country proposed 476 new restrictions on abortion and reproductive rights, few bills were more popular than bans on sex-selective abortions. The bans, on the books in eight states, make it a crime to perform an abortion for a woman who is motivated by her fetus’ sex.

But debates around these bans have been lacking something: cold, hard proof that there is a “growing trend,” as a failed US House bill put it, of women in the United States having abortions to select for gender. Instead, anti-abortion activists have justified these bans on the basis that there are Asian women immigrating to America—women who supposedly bring with them cultural biases against having girl children.

This week, the University of Chicago Law School released a new study that scrutinizes large sets of data for evidence of sex-selective abortions in America. Titled “Replacing Myths with Facts: Sex-Selective Abortion Laws in the United States,” the paper kneecaps the racist arguments behind the bans.

The authors draw on an analysis of US birth data, numerous interviews in the field, and a broad survey of peer-reviewed social-science publications to identify and bust numerous myths used to promote sex-selective abortion bans. Notably, the study undermines one of the only pieces of empirical support proponents of these bans can point to, a 2008 paper by economists Lena Edlund and Douglas Almond. Edlund and Almond concluded that when foreign-born Chinese, Korean, and Indian women have two daughters, their third child will tend to be a son—a trend that suggests sex-selective abortions are being performed, ban proponents say. Their source is US census data that is nearly 15 years old. The University of Chicago study, using newer data from the 2007 and 2011 American Community Survey, found that when all their children are taken into account, foreign-born Chinese, Korean, and Indian parents actually have more daughters than white Americans do.

The study also notes that India and China are not, as proponents of these bans claim, the only countries with male-biased sex ratios. In fact, the countries with the highest ratios are Liechtenstein and Armenia.

Remarks made by South Dakota Republican state Rep. Don Haggar this spring, as his state debated its ban, provide a typical example of how lawmakers link Asian immigrants to a rise in sex-selective abortions: “Let me tell you, our population in South Dakota is a lot more diverse than it ever was,” he said. “There are cultures that look at a sex-selection abortion as being culturally okay…[It’s] important that we send a message that this is a state that values life, regardless of its sex.”

But the authors found evidence that the opposite is true. “Recent polling data refutes the existence of son preference among Asian Americans in the United States,” they write. Below are the results of a 2012 survey that asked Asian Americans the following: “In some countries, people are allowed to have only one child. If, for whatever reason, you could only have one child, would you want it to be a boy, a girl, or does it not matter?”

Replacing Myths with Facts: Sex-Selective Abortion Laws in the United States

Other myths the study addresses include:

  • The notion that male-biased sex ratios are proof of sex-selective abortions. In fact, a skewed ratio can be explained by artificial insemination methods that allow parents to choose the gender of their child.
  • Arguments that the United States is one of the only countries that doesn’t ban sex-selective abortions. In reality, it is one of only five countries where there are such bans. (The others are China, Kosovo, Vietnam, and Nepal.)
  • The idea that sex-selective abortion bans unskew male-biased birth ratios. The authors reviewed five years of data in Pennsylvania and Illinois after those states enacted their bans, and found no evidence that the bans changed sex ratios among newborns.

Finally, the study makes the case that sex-selective abortion bans are just another inventive way to restrict abortion. It rejects arguments, by anti-abortion rights groups and lawmakers, that these bans are feminist and protect women. “An analysis of voting records in the six states that have enacted sex-selective abortion bans in the last four years shows that votes on the laws closely follow party lines, with overwhelming support from Republican legislators,” the study says.

The study sources the recent wave of sex-selective abortion bans to a 2008 article by Northwestern Law professor Steven Calabresi: “Key to eroding Roe v. Wade…is to pass a number of state or federal laws that restrict abortion rights in ways approved of by at least fifty percent of the public,” Calabresi wrote, such as a ban on abortion for sex selection.

The University of Chicago Law School International Human Rights Clinic conducted its study with the Advancing New Standards in Reproductive Health, a reproductive health care policy group, and the National Asian Pacific American Women’s Forum, a progressive policy group which opposes sex-selective abortion bans. NAPAWF argues these bans perpetuate negative stereotypes against Asian American women, and the group is suing to block a sex-selective abortion ban in Arizona.

WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

Because the in-depth journalism on underreported beats and unique perspectives on the daily news you turn to Mother Jones for is only possible because readers fund us. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism we exist to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

And we need readers to show up for us big time—again.

Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

If you can right now, please support the journalism you get from Mother Jones with a donation at whatever amount works for you. And please do it now, before you move on to whatever you're about to do next and think maybe you'll get to it later, because every gift matters and we really need to see a strong response if we're going to raise the $253,000 we need in less than three weeks.

payment methods

WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

Because the in-depth journalism on underreported beats and unique perspectives on the daily news you turn to Mother Jones for is only possible because readers fund us. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism we exist to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

And we need readers to show up for us big time—again.

Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

If you can right now, please support the journalism you get from Mother Jones with a donation at whatever amount works for you. And please do it now, before you move on to whatever you're about to do next and think maybe you'll get to it later, because every gift matters and we really need to see a strong response if we're going to raise the $253,000 we need in less than three weeks.

payment methods

We Recommend

Latest

Sign up for our free newsletter

Subscribe to the Mother Jones Daily to have our top stories delivered directly to your inbox.

Get our award-winning magazine

Save big on a full year of investigations, ideas, and insights.

Subscribe

Support our journalism

Help Mother Jones' reporters dig deep with a tax-deductible donation.

Donate