TightWind is written by Kyle Baxter. Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.

Ross Douthat on abortion being used to end the lives of female babies in the developing world:

For one thing, it presents a policy problem: If the right to abortion is a fundamental human liberty, how do you address sex selection without infringing dramatically on the right to privacy? (A similar problem would obtain in the Yglesian hypothetical: How far would liberals be willing to go to restrict access to the boy-producing contraception? What would a liberal court have to say about efforts to ban it? Etc.)

Douthat links to a new book by Mara Hvistendahl which alleges that selective abortions in developing nations like China and India are largely responsible for the huge disparity—160 million women—between the number of men and women in these countries.

Abortions absolutely are used for this purpose in China and India, but I haven’t read the book nor seen her evidence, so I won’t comment on the validity of her claim that selective abortions are largely responsible for the disparity, but using abortion for this purpose should be troubling regardless for those who believe it should be legal and those who don’t. In these cases, a child (or fetus, if you’d rather use a sterilized term) is killed not because the mother and father cannot care for it, but because of its gender. That’s horrifying.

If Hvistendahl’s argument is true, how do those in favor of abortion deal with it? There’s a dilemma here; a large disparity between men and women is incredibly damaging for society, but addressing it would require restricting abortion—which they’ve argued is fundamental to a woman’s privacy and autonomy.