Female Foeticide Legal In Sweden

The Local

The woman, who already had two daughters, requested an amniocentesis in order to allay concerns about possible chromosome abnormalities. At the same time, she also asked to know the foetus's gender.

Doctors at Mälaren Hospital expressed concern and asked Sweden’s National Board of Health and Welfare (Socialstyrelsen) to draw up guidelines on how to handle requests in the future in which they "feel pressured to examine the foetus’s gender" without having a medically compelling reason to do so.

The board has now responded that such requests and thus abortions can not be refused and that it is not possible to deny a woman an abortion up to the 18th week of pregnancy, even if the foetus's gender is the basis for the request.

Call me a cynic, but I wonder who exactly this will benefit ? You have to (if you're me) jump to the conclusion that people who really, really want a boy might be involved.

I've not thought too much about sex ratios in relation to UK demography and mass immigration. It might be that we're not only talking about 23% of schoolchildren, but more than 23% of boys. I wonder what the sex ratios are for these births ?

(via David Duff)

"we still have relatively high levels of pregnancies going to birth"

Former Green Party chair Jonathon Porritt laments the shortage of dead babies.

Couples who have more than two children are being “irresponsible” by creating an unbearable burden on the environment, the government’s green adviser has warned.

Jonathon Porritt, who chairs the government’s Sustainable Development Commission, says curbing population growth through contraception and abortion must be at the heart of policies to fight global warming.

Hmmm. We currently top about 200,000 babies pa. Just ain't enough, apparently.

At this point the ST Health Editor Sarah-Kate Templeton treads dangerous ground :

The British population, now 61m, will pass 70m by 2028, the Office for National Statistics says. The fertility rate for women born outside Britain is estimated to be 2.5, compared with 1.7 for those born here. The global population of 6.7 billion is expected to rise to 9.2 billion by 2050.

I wonder where she got the stats for mothers born outside the UK ? Anyone been through the last couple of years ONS Population Trends stats , the ones that come out in December ? I confess I haven't read through them, just noted the headline figures on births to foreign-born mothers. The ONS have already estimated fertility by ethnicity - and the figures chime neatly with the list of boroughs with the highest fertility rates. I look forward to Mr Porritt telling the good people of Bradford, Darwen and Newham why they really ought to be aborting more babies. Like his ideal baby, he'll be lucky to get out alive.


Tangentially, Times sportswriter Simon Barnes wonderful and heartwarming piece on his Down syndrome son. The strange thing is that the same government who'll fine you for not having disabled access to your business or parish hall is happy to kill the disabled the moment they discover their existence :

At the hospital, when they discovered on the scan that Down’s syndrome was a possibility, they very kindly offered to kill him for us.

Correction - of course we don't top 600,000 babies a year - 600,000 is the approximate number of live births. We only top about 200,000.

A Few Bits of Wrapping Paper From The Curate's Bedroom Floor

A happy, secure and prosperous New Year to you, although my head tells me it's more likely to be an 'interesting' one.

Just a few stories that caught the eye but no time to blog thereon :

The policy of fighting 'child poverty' by throwing extra benefits at low-income 'families' is certainly having an effect - as the least-educated mothers opt for more children.

The researchers then looked at fertility rates both before the reforms were announced and after, for a sample of 101,330 women aged between 20 and 45.

They found a large increase in the first year after the benefits were made more generous, particularly among women who had left school as soon as possible.

The results show a 15 per cent increase in the probability of having a baby in the "low education group", equivalent to an extra 45,000 births compared with 670,000 across Britain as a whole.

Overall there has been a steady rise in the birth rate since 2001, and although some of this is down to higher fertility among immigrants, even among women born in the UK it has risen from 1.68 births per woman in 2004 to 1.79 last year.

Well, even 'women born in the UK' will increasingly be the daughters of migrants. I'd love to see a geographic or ethnic split for the figures. We know already that the largest number of births are in the areas with the largest numbers of immigrants, and that the most educated women have fewest babies. This latter trend appears to have been reinforced by Labour's reforms. The full report (pdf) is here.

Surprise surprise. The massed ranks of Guardianistas in the Probation 'Service', as well as other liberal do-gooders, don't like the Government's latest vote-grabbing scheme (a scheme I agree with, while having no illusions about what's driving it).

Plans to make criminals wear high-visibility jackets while doing community punishments face being undermined by a probation service “institutionally on the side of offenders”, the Government’s neighbourhood crime adviser said.

Louise Casey said that she was afraid it would use health and safety reasons as an excuse for offenders not to wear the jackets, which will bear the words “Community Payback”. She said that it was a “no-brainer” to make offenders wear them, because they showed the public that there were consequences for criminals who were given non-custodial sentences. She said also that she wanted leaflets put through letterboxes to tell people the outcome of crimes in their area.

Ms Casey told The Times that she was astonished at the level of opposition within the probation service to the jackets idea. “[The plan] will have to be driven very, very hard, but this is just the beginning to opening up the criminal justice system. I think the other thing that will meet huge resistance is sharing information about what happens to criminals.”

She added that there was a huge gap in providing information to neighbourhoods about what had happened to suspects taken to court and the punishments handed down. If people were told more about what had happened in the courts, they would have more faith in the criminal justice system.

I didn't know HMG had tweaked the law a few years back to make it legal for bailiffs to break into your house. Where the hell were the Tories ?

Now they want the bailiffs to be able to beat you up as well.

The government has been accused of trampling on individual liberties by proposing wide-ranging new powers for bailiffs to break into homes and to use “reasonable force” against householders who try to protect their valuables.

Under the regulations, bailiffs for private firms would for the first time be given permission to restrain or pin down householders. They would also be able to force their way into homes to seize property to pay off debts, such as unpaid credit card bills and loans.

The government, which wants to crack down on people who evade debts, says the new powers would be overseen by a robust industry watchdog.

From last year - a Muslim convert to Christianity gets full police support ...

A British citizen who converted to Christianity from Islam and then complained to police when locals threatened to burn his house down was told by officers to “stop being a crusader”, according to a new report.

Nissar Hussein, 43, from Bradford, West Yorkshire, who was born and raised in Britain, converted from Islam to Christianity with his wife, Qubra, in 1996. The report says that he was subjected to a number of attacks and, after being told that his house would be burnt down if he did not repent and return to Islam, reported the threat to the police. It says he was told that such threats were rarely carried out and the police officer told him to “stop being a crusader and move to another place”. A few days later the unoccupied house next door was set on fire.

A blog wholly devoted to the great Dalrymple. He is published in so many places it's hard to keep track. The Skeptical Doctor is the place which does all the work, and so I forgive the American spelling.

Britons once had the right to bear arms just as did Americans. How did it disappear ?

In a salami stylee - a slice at a time. "All the way down the slippery slope" follows the history.

It's not just the jobs that Poles flock to the UK for. While our electronics and space manufacturing sectors may not be too hot (when did anyone last buy an item of consumer electronics made in the UK ?) our thriving abortion industry is a (admittedly tax-subsidised) world leader.

Ten thousand Polish women had abortions in Britain last year, it has been reported, in procedures which are thought to have cost the NHS between £5million and £10m.

Thousands of the women are thought to have come to Britain specifically for the procedure, which is illegal in Poland.

People coming to Britain as temporary workers are given a National Insurance number, which allows them to register with a doctor and have NHS treatment.

Britain is thought to be a particularly popular destination as terminations can be carried out as late as 24 weeks into a pregnancy. In several other EU countries, abortions can not be carried out after 12 weeks.

A pill given to women under nine weeks pregnant costs the NHS about £500 while an operation necessary for those further into pregnancy costs about £1,600 including after-care.

Magistrate quits because "he recently jailed an offender for six months but saw him walking about the town just six weeks later".

Dr Soper said: 'My greatest frustration and that of my colleagues is the very early release of prisoners.'

He said virtually all offenders are released automatically halfway through their sentences, while emergency measures to tackle prison overcrowding means many have another 18 days knocked off their sentences. Yet the judges and magistrates who heard their cases have no say over their early release.

Dr Soper said magistrates considered 'very hard' how to punish criminals, and added: 'It is frustrating when that careful thought seems to be undermined. It has certainly reduced my confidence in the system.'

Community service and unpaid work have been trumpeted by ministers as punishments to help ease jail overcrowding, but Dr Soper said his own research locally showed only 60-65 per cent of offenders bothered to turn up.

Police were increasingly preferring to deal with offenders through cautions and on-the-spot fines rather than charging them and sending them to court, he said - undermining the principle of public and media scrutiny of justice.

Dr Soper said: 'It is not just minor cases they deal with - theft and violence are included and this court recently had a violent offender who had previously been cautioned by the police for causing grievous bodily harm.'

In his years as a JP, Dr Soper said, the number of courts in West Suffolk had dropped from six to three - and will soon be cut to just one.

'The idea of local justice, one of the strengths of the system, is disappearing fast,' he said.

'Now I hear that the courts budget is to be cut further, so what next?'

Blimey. When Micael Portillo, who lost his political stomach in 1997 and has since reinvented himself as touchy-feely Mr Nice Guy, says "Britain has lost the stomach for a fight" I think we should take notice.

It raises questions about the stamina of our nation and the resolve of our political class. It is an uncomfortable conclusion that Britain, with nuclear weapons, cruise missiles, aircraft carriers and the latest generation of fighter-bombers, is incapable of securing a medium-size conurbation. Making Basra safe was an essential part of the overall strategy; having committed ourselves to our allies we let them down.

The extent of Britain’s fiasco has been masked by the media’s relief that we are at last leaving Iraq. Those who have been urging Britain to quit are not in a strong position to criticise the government’s lack of staying power. Reporting of Basra has mainly focused on British casualties and the prospect for withdrawal. The British media and public have shown scant regard for our failure to protect Iraqis, so the British nation, not just its government, has attracted distrust. We should reflect on what sort of country we have become. We may enjoy patronising Americans but they demonstrate a fibre that we now lack.

But be fair. One of the strange contradictions of NuLabs regime is the willingness to upset Muslims overseas while bending over backwards to avoid upsetting them in the UK (apart from the said overseas upsets). The retreat from Basra would at least be a mark of consistency, of bringing foreign policy into craven line with domestic, were it not for the fact that the withdrawal is almost certainly aimed at facilitating an additional troop movement into Afghanistan. Our boys will go from being blown up in under-armoured vehicles, short of body armour and helicopters, in Iraq, to being blown up in under-armoured vehicles, short of body armour and helicopters, in Afghanistan - all so that little Nooria can go to school.

Shouldn't that read "wrong baby" ?

Nurse gave wrong woman abortion

Abortion Deaths Pre-Legalisation

I posted on the Ann Furedi thread: "Oh, that question. These untold thousands who died from back-street abortions in the bad old days. Is there any factual evidence for this, or numbers of any kind, or is it just another left-wing myth ?"


ChooChoo answered as follows :

@LabanTell:

I'd hesitate to say 'myth'. But there are problems with some figures and, of course, this is further problematised by the polemical contexts of inveterate debates. The US is interesting because abortion remains a livewire political debate: not just because of social dynamics, but also because of the legal context there. Unlike here, the (from one view) judicial fiat by which abortion was legalised in the states generates tensions beyond the usual ones in this debate.

In Planned Parenthood vs. Casey (Bob, a lifelong Democrat incidentally), the figure of 5,000-10,000 pre-legalisation deaths was mentioned. This figure, a common one in the US context, goes back to attempted extrapolations from studies from the 1930s, for instance, by one Frederick Taussig (published in '36). He used figures for the abortion rate (not the abortion mortality rate) from NY and Iowa birth control clinics, combined with his own estimates for the mortality rate to come up with the figures. (There were others which used similar techniques).

In reality, these figures are dubious and not least because of their use in polemical contexts. In 'Induced termination of pregnancy before and after Roe v. Wade', in the Journal of the American Medical Association, 208.22 (1992) pp.3231-3239, the authors use pre-legalisation figures for abortion mortality from National Center [sic] for Health Statistics:

1940 - c.1400

1945 - c.750

1950 - c.250

1955 - c.225

1960 - c.250

1970 - c.125

(The exact figure for pre-legalisation 1972 is 39. Abortion mortality figures still do exist post-legalisation, and the figure hovered around c.20 post-legalisation before dropping further in the 80s or 90s, I forget which).

These figures can hardly settle the question. First, they don't show how many total abortions there were. Second, they do not, in themselves, get into the difficulty of arriving at such figures. This difficulty, incidentally, is not just for finding reliable pre-legalisation figures, but also reliable post-legalisation figures. (Assigning abortion as cause of death is not as simple as it may sound). Third, these do not get into all sorts of social factors (was there a change in the public acceptability of treating women who had had abortions?). (These figures, per se, are far more reliable than, say, Taussig's).

Fundamentally, however, and this occurs in other contexts too, the large reduction in abortion mortality correlates to (and is no doubt caused by) medical provisions: most importantly, the diffusion of antibiotics. Medical provisions are more important in bringing down abortion mortality than legality. (This is not to deny that legality cannot or does not have an effect of safety: it does, but this relation is heightened where the safety, even where legal, would not be so good. Conversely, where medical provisions are good - not just supplies, but access - legality cannot have a strong effect on abortion mortality). In a first-world context, the notion that illegality will result in the death of scores of women is not tenable. (Another important aspect to this is that pre-legality abortion, certainly in the states, was largely - c.90% - carried out by physicians: this is what emerges from works on the reality of abortion by the likes of Mary Claderone - erstwhile medical director of Planned Parenthood - in the 60s). This is not to deny the total legitimacy of being worried about this, or of valuing women's lives. (Of course not). I'm just trying to write a little about the figures for abortion mortality.

I'm most grateful to him or her for this - the only information I've ever seen on the subject. If anyone's got any info on Britain I'd be interested.

Massacre of the Comments

Abortion promoter Ann Furedi was writing in the Guardian yesterday on how 200,00 abortions a year (compared with around 693,000 live births) are really quite a Good Thing. There were some interesting comments - 50-odd, so Laban chipped in with his four penn'orth.

This morning there was only one comment - mine - and now even that has gone. Hardly any on the whole site now. Comment is Free seems to have turned into Comment-Free. Even Herod only deleted the first-born.

When I was writing my post on abortion, sex-education and demographic change I'd forgotten a conversation I'd had a couple of weeks back with a Catholic educator and committted Labour Party man, who was still active in education in a large Northern city. A decent sort. Two things he told me that stuck - one being that the area where he'd been a head for umpteen years was bedevilled by white flight - parents applying to out-of-area schools, the other being the increasing pressure from Muslim parents for single-sex secondary education.

I can completely understand that - they look at the native girls and think - "I don't want my daughter growing up like that".

Just so would a Victorian father have felt, could he have seen the future. Victorian secondary schools were nearly all single-sex. In those cities where the old buildings survive, you may still see schools with entrances marked 'Girls' and 'Boys'.

The 2006 ONS Birth stats (pdf) are the latest available series - and more than ever they show the demographic transformation of our great cities. Children born to foreign-born mothers make up 22% of babies born in England and Wales (Table 9.2) but it's the city figures which are telling.

Newcastle 23%
Blackburn 27%
Manchester 38%
Sheffield 21%
Bradford 32%
Leiester 41%
Nottingham 24%
Northampton 25%
Birmingham 36%
Coventry 29%
Luton 48%
Cambridge 41%
Peterborough 30%
Watford 36%
Inner London 59%
Outer London 48%
Milton Keynes 30%
Reading 36%
Slough 53%
Oxford 42%

Table 9.5 gives us total fertility rates by country of birth of mother. While they differ somewhat from Richard Berthoud's 2001 calcs, which were I believe based on ethnicity rather than country of birth, the pattern is clear.

United Kingdom 1.6
India 2.3
Pakistan 4.7
Bangladesh 3.9
East Africa 1.6
Rest of Africa 2.0
Other New Commonwealth 2.2
Rest of World 1.8



I think, given these stats, that

a) demographic change is likely to bring about a lowering of the abortion rate, just as it's already seen a raising of the birth rate. I expect to see the number of abortions start to fall in the next few years, as the number of young people from non-aborting cultures rises, and the number from aborting cultures falls. Truly the sexual revolution contains the aborted seeds of its own destruction.

b) this lowering of the abortion rate will doubtless be hailed as a triumph by Ann Furedi and the rest of the sex-ed/abortion industry.

c) but it'll be a very short-lived triumph. In our major cities the pressure for single-sex secondary schools will become irresistible as more and more voters call for them. Those single-sex schools will NOT have a Furedi-style sex-ed policy - the policy is far more likely to be a Victorian-style - 'don't even talk about it, let alone do it' policy - especially in girls schools. Of course single-sex schools and Victorian sex ed worked pretty well for the natives once - before they learned better.

I Believe That Children Aren't Our Future ...

New record abortion figures :

The number of abortions in all women rose by 2.5% to reach an all time high of almost 200,000.

Big increases in children killing children - to be fair, this only parallels what's happening outside on the streets.

The number of abortions among girls aged under 16 rose by 10% to 4,376 in 2007, official figures for England and Wales show. In the under 14s, abortions rose by 21% from 135 in 2006 to 163 last year.



I wonder what the solutions to this great problem are. They wouldn't by any chance involve more, earlier and compulsory sex education ? There are a whole lot of tax-funded types just itching to get the message across to younger and younger kids. After all, that's the classic liberal solution.

"Whatever you did before that didn't work, do more of it"

Let the BBC tell us about a few :

Gill Frances, chair of the Teenage Pregnancy Independent Advisory Group, said: "We know what works to reduce abortion amongst teenagers. We need high quality sex and relationships education at school and at home and effective contraception."

Ah, the old 'what works' mantra !

Ann Furedi, chief executive of the British Pregnancy Advisory Service, said: "Much more needs to be done to equip young people to deal with the complexities of their personal relationships and to empower them to ask for high quality, user-friendly forms of contraception without embarrassment.

Quite right, Ann. Double doses of empowerment to be issued to all schools, and a rolling programme of upgrades to the equipment needed to deal with the complexities of their personal relationships !

(I digress - but surely the relationships between young males and young females are some of the least complex relationships on the planet - at least as far as the young men are concerned ? Ann's mum obviously never told her that 'they're only after one thing !')

Julie Bentley, chief executive at the FPA (Family Planning Association) said sex and relationship education should be compulsory in every school. "Younger women are making different choices about their lives and choosing abortion over motherhood, but education and contraceptive services will stop them becoming pregnant in the first place."

"Choosing abortion over motherhood", eh ? Just like some young men choose rape over temporary celibacy ? I guess its just a "different choice", after all ... for the person doing the choosing.

The strange thing is that all this nonsense is contradicted by the evidence of one UK community. They are characterised by what Ann Furedi and Gill Francis would doubtless consider extremely low quality sex and relationships education - namely "don't do it" - the sort of sex education that worked remarkably well for the British for the last 500 years, even when contraception was almost non-existent. Somehow around the early 70s we decided that Gill Francis had the right idea after all - and bastardy, sexually transmitted infections and abortions have been rising ever since, in tandem with a falling birth rate.

What would be interesting to see is the way in which the changing pattern of numbers of abortions in a given age group compares with the changing patterns of numbers of young women in said age group. After all, if the numbers of abortions in U14s rises by 21% but the number of U14s rises by 25%, that would be a fall in the 'per 1,000 U14 females' figure. (that's an example - I think it unlikely that the numbers of U14 females could change so rapidly).

What would also be interesting would be a breakdown by ethnic group. We know that more than 23% of schoolchildren are ethnic minority. We know that the Indian and particularly the Bangladeshi/Pakistani communities have low rates of sexually transmitted disease and high rates of fertility. I think it highly unlikely that they're having many abortions - although their (native) girlfriends might.

We can probably expect more episodes like this as the desires of the people (whose children get STIs and have abortions) for more and more sex education clash with the desires of those (whose children don't - and they want to keep it that way) for less or none.

So it appears that the shrinking native population is having ever more abortions while the incomers are having ever more babies. Keith Ajegbo's "British Lessons For English Children" report tells us that "in 10 years time, 15% of the workforce will be Muslim".

Some marketing geek at Lloyds TSB has been looking at the data and drawing his conclusions. These guys are paid a lot of money to do the figures. Double click to see it full size.

Yes, it's "Female Foeticide UK" !

Killing babies is the most basic of human rights (except for the baby of course).

Unless that is you kill more girl babies than boy babies. Welcome to the wonderful world of 'female foeticide', no longer a basic human right but instead 'an extreme manifestation of violence against women'. Your killing, to be ethical, should of course be race, gender, sexuality and disability neutral. Sorry, did I mention disability ? Forget about that one (and whisper it, but it's not race-neutral either).

Anyway, what's new ? I posted all about this in March, when the great and the good were getting all in a tizz about what was happening in India.

In India you can test for the sex of your unborn child, then knock it on the head if you don't like the result. "A woman's right to choose", remember ? "Every child a wanted child - every mother a willing mother".

In the good old UK, of course, we stopped telling parents the sex of the unborn at scan-time for precisely that reason. But a woman's right to choose can't be thwarted that easily.

Between 1990 and 2005 almost 1,500 fewer girls were born to Indian mothers in England and Wales than would have been expected for that group, researchers say. This represents one in ten girls “missing” from the birth statistics for Indian-born women having their third or fourth child. The findings will be revealed in a special radio programme to be broadcast on the BBC’s Asian Network digital radio station this evening.

One British-born mother, who has three daughters, tells the programme that she terminated a pregnancy intentionally last year. “Meena”, an office worker in her 30s, said that she had no difficulty in finding a gynaecologist in Delhi willing to do a scan to determine the sex of the baby, and then to perform the abortion.

“Me and my husband decided to go to India and try and find out what we were having and unfortunately it was another girl,” she said. “My husband and I thought the burden would probably be too much. So we decided to terminate.”

The programme also sent an undercover pregnant British-Indian woman to several top doctors in Delhi for a scan – three doctors agreed to it in the full knowledge that the woman would abort the child if it was a girl and that such scans are banned in India.

I await the screams of outrage for this dreadful crime from the Stroppys and Natalies of this world, followed by demands for more Indian boys to be topped until equality is achieved.

Polly Toynbee - "Calls for abortion up to full term"

Apparently (if the CiF comments are to be believed), in a BBC News 24 "Head 2 Head" (sorry) debate with the Tory MP Michael Gove, Poll Pot called for abortion to be available up to the full nine months.

Anybody got the video ?

Forty Years Of Hurt (Warning - not child friendly - in any sense)

Over six million "terminated" babies. Around one pregnancy in four ends this way, while Guardianistas witter about an "ageing society" and why we need lots more immigration.

This isn't an equal-opportunity massacre. Little Mohammeds and Ayeshas will mostly survive it, God willing little Theresas and Dominics stand a better chance. Not sure about little Brooklyns and Jades - or little Micahs and Shanelles. In the States a third of black babies are aborted. The figure for ALL races in England and Wales is just under a quarter - around 650,000 live births and 180,000 abortions.



"AM I NOT A MAN AND A BROTHER ?"

The Personal Is Political, What ?

Demographic patterns themselves reflect social and cultural shifts. Europe has not lost its physical ability to reproduce; it is not naturally less fecund than other cultures. Rather, many European societies seem simply to have lost interest in producing children. It is possible that Europe’s estrangement from the act of reproduction reflects a mood of moral uncertainty and fear of the future. Yet the stabilisation of Europe’s population levels or even a further fall in its birth rates need not be discussed in apocalyptic terms. In our hi-tech era, societies are less dependent on the size of their populations than they have ever been. A reduction in the size of a country’s population does not necessarily lead to a loss of power or influence.

In any case, the trend towards declining fertility rates in Europe is unlikely to be reversed in the long run. Pro-natal policies have little impact on European people’s choices or behaviour. In fact, as Heinsohn suggests, such policies will probably benefit immigrant couples who wish to have a large family ...

State-funded academic Frank Furedi in Spiked. His wife Ann is chief exec of BPAS, the state-funded abortion service which makes such a hefty contribution to the annual 200,000-odd UK abortion cull, and which has such extremely dodgy practices.

The chat around the Furedi breakfast bar must be interesting.

(Mr Furedi's state-funded colleague Ellie 'cut the umbilical cord, then kill them' Lee seems a scary woman. I bet she gets on well with her Pro-Choice Forum colleague Dr Stuart 'post-natal termination' Derbyshire.)

"Yer Mum killed yer baby brother !"

"having had two children, I had an early abortion when I found out that I was pregnant with a third, and had not – contrary to what I was "expected" to feel – experienced any indecision, guilt or trauma."

I wonder if Caitlin Moran's kids are at school yet ?

(on the other hand her surviving offspring will probably go to the kind of school where "yer mum" taunts are less common)


UPDATE - a correspondent points out her classic "Abortion: why it’s the ultimate motherly act". Got to be up there with "I wouldn't hit you if I didn't care about you".

Abortion Contradictions

Killing babies is the most basic of human rights (except for the baby of course).

Unless that is you kill more girl babies than boy babies. Welcome to the wonderful world of 'female foeticide', no longer a basic human right but instead 'an extreme manifestation of violence against women'. Your killing, to be ethical, should of course be race, gender, sexuality and disability neutral. Sorry, did I mention disability ? Forget about that one.

In the Observer, Will Hutton rails against "the calamity of Asia's lost women". I wonder when we'll see a piece about Britain's lost children.

Hutton's hypocrisy knows no bounds.

"Both governments are becoming more and more worried about the psychological and social consequences, not to mention the sheer criminality of it. As one Indian commentator remarks, the most dangerous period of a woman's life is her first few months in the womb."

The most dangerous period of any CHILD'S life in the UK is the first few months in the womb. Look at the figures. 639,721 live births - not all of which willbe to residents, against 185,415 abortions to residents. That's 22.5% of all conception knoocked on the head, ignoring natural miscarriage and RU486 (aka "morning-after") casualties. In India there are around 25 million births pa and according to this study perhaps as many as 6.6 million abortions. If those figures, at the high end of disputed estimates, are correct that's 21% of conceptions - LESS than the UK figure. Where's Hutton's outrage at the 'sheer criminality' of the UK ?

And as for Will's social consequences - there have been over 6 million UK abortions since 1967. I keep reading, not least in the Guardian, how mass immigration is necessary because of 'our ageing society'. Doesn't that count as a 'social consequence' ?

The guy is a total hypocrite - prepared to blather on about the consequences for other people while turning a blind eye to consequences at home. Indian women are making the same choice to abort as Brit women have been doing, only the reasons are different.

And Will can't stomach that. Cultural imperialist. I spit in his latte.