An expectant mother/FILE
A separate article in the same issue of the Canadian Medical Association Journal warns that Canada has become “a haven for parents who would terminate female fetuses in favor of having sons” due to advanced prenatal testing and easy access to abortion.
“Female feticide happens in India and China by the millions, but it also happens in North America in numbers large enough to distort the male to female ratio in some ethnic groups,” said the editorial by interim editor-in-chief Rajendra Kale.
While few studies have been done to assess how frequent the practice may be among immigrant communities in Canada, the editorial points to research that suggests sex-selection is more common among immigrants from India, China, Korea, Vietnam and the Philippines who already have at least one daughter.
It cites US census data from 2000 that shows male-biased sex ratios among US-born children of Asian parents, and a study of 65 Indian women in the US from 2004-2009 that showed 89 percent of them terminated pregnancies with female fetuses.
Kale told AFP he believes that several hundred sex-selective abortions take place in Canada each year.
“Should female feticide in Canada be ignored because it is a small problem localized to minority ethnic groups? No,” said the editorial written by Kale, a Mumbai-born neurologist.
“The solution is to postpone the disclosure of medically irrelevant information to women until after about 30 weeks of pregnancy.”
Canada in 2004 outlawed fertility practices that would increase the likelihood that an embryo will be a certain sex, or that would identify an in-vitro embryo by sex for any reason other than to diagnose a sex-linked disorder or disease.
Kale said the Canadian medical establishment needs to go further, and make express rulings that would ban fetal sex disclosure before seven months, when it is too late for an abortion.
He added that doctors should nevertheless “avoid painting all Asians with the same broad brush and doing injustice to those who are against sex selection,” but called for collective cooperation by women of all races.
“The execution of a ‘disclose sex only after 30 weeks’ policy would require the understanding and willingness of women of all ethnicities to make a temporary compromise,” he wrote.
“Postponing the transmission of such information is a small price to pay to save thousands of girls in Canada.”
The Canadian Medical Association, the country’s largest doctors’ group with 70,000 members, stressed that editorial viewpoints are not necessarily those of the CMA.
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