Selective Memory?

Never in British history has there been a prosecution for sex-selective abortion. In 2013, the Director of Public Prosecutions, Keir Starmer, declined to bring charges against two doctors who had been caught on camera agreeing to arrange abortions of baby girls purely because of their sex. He wrote to the Attorney General, Dominic Grieve, that, "The law does not, in terms, expressly prohibit gender-specific abortions; rather it prohibits any abortion carried out without two medical practitioners having formed a view, in good faith, that the health risks of continuing with a pregnancy outweigh those of termination." Starmer had concluded that there would be no public interest in a prosecution. That has been the conclusion in every such case.

Scotland is now moving formally to legalise sex-selective abortion. Whatever happened to gender self-identification? On what pro-choice grounds could anyone object to this particular choice? If half of unborn children were male, in the old-fashioned sense of having Y chromosomes, then how could they be part of a woman's body? And in that case, then how could the other half be part of that body, either?

China is less than two per cent Muslim, and there are only 200,000 Muslims, mostly foreign workers, among the 51.75 million inhabitants of South Korea. Taiwan is less than one per cent Muslim, as is Vietnam. The Muslim 14 per cent of the population of India accounts for only 6.6 per cent of sex-selective abortions in the country that accounts for 50 per cent of the world's missing female births. Like the husband who murdered her, Anu Bansal was a Hindu, as are 86.7 per cent of those who procure female foeticide, although Hindus are only 80 per cent of the population. The figures for Sikhs are 4.9 and 1.7. The practice is increasingly evident among the richer residents of the urban areas of Nepal, which is proportionally the most Hindu country in the world.

There is a certain culture of female infanticide in urban Pakistan, but Muhammad explicitly condemned it, since it had been prevalent in pre-Islamic Arabia. Were a Bill to ban sex-selective abortion to come before the House of Commons, then be in no doubt that those voting for the ban would include Shockat Adam, Adnan Hussain, Iqbal Mohamed and Ayoub Khan. The Durham Miners' Hall where Starmer broke the lockdown to feed his alcoholism played host this afternoon to the founding meeting of Your Party in County Durham, addressed by Zarah Sultana. She has drawn the line. She will not be in a party with people who did not accept that men could be women, and she is not above calling Muslim men misogynists if they disagreed with her.

What does Sultana think of the fact that, possibly beginning as early as next week, the NHS will be funding the experimental testing of puberty blockers on children after the original experiment on sheep had had to be abandoned because the blockers had caused impaired memory, altered behaviour, enlarged amygdala, and lasting brain damage even once the treatment had stopped? So, children it is instead, then. What say you, Wes Streeting? But then, the law forbids the inhumane killing of third trimester vertebrate fetuses of any species except one. Our own. Margaret Thatcher abolished the time limit on abortion where there was "a substantial risk that if the child were born it would suffer from such physical or mental abnormalities as to be seriously handicapped", of which the risk did not need to be quantified, nor the abnormalities specified. And even that fig leaf is about to be discarded.