Sex Selection: The United Nations Special Session

Perfect World Dept: However, it is not a perfect world, and so we are confronted with efforts to ban sex selection to stop discrimination against females, such as those of MP Mark Warawa in Bill M-408 , according to The Star. In 2002 the United Nations Special Session on Children clearly described sex selective feticide as gender-based violence. This is despite the fact that the Convention on the Rights of the Child defines a child as a human being, meaning that arguably the human fetus is not a proper subject for concern under the Convention and in a perfect world, sex selection would not exist. Parents would not prefer a male child, even to achieve a gender balance in their offspring. Vulnerable women would not be subjected to abortions, including late-term abortions because they are carrying a female child, or be required to be continually pregnant until a male is born. The increase in trafficking of women due to adverse sex ratios would dry up and alleged associated ills such as an increased number of rapes, abduction and wife-sharing would end. At the political level, the predominant number of men would not re-enforce male control over political power. The family pressures through which sex selection are sometimes required and the surrounding culture of discrimination against women surely constitute a grave problem, especially in countries with wildly skewed sex ratios like India and China. Such circumstances have led the United Nations Human Rights machinery to attack all sex selection. The Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination Against Women has concluded that it is discriminatory and constitutes violence against women. It has not specified whether the victim is the female fetus, the mother, or women in general. (www.immigrantscanada.com). As reported in the news.