The Canadian Medical Association wants doctors to withhold the gender of fetuses from parents until at least 30 weeks.
That’s caused a lot of controversy this week.
They have a good reason to take that stand – saying that women are using the information to abort female fetuses. That’s reason enough for me to support such a stance. That’s not a pro-choice or pro-life statement, but a pro-woman position.
Can you think of a more extreme form of discrimination against women than not even allowing them to be born? Not only that, but mothers who are getting these abortions aren’t typically doing it on their own accord. They’re forced or pressured into doing it by their families who want a male heir.  
According to a Toronto Star report, those allegations aren’t too far from the truth either.
The 2006 census showed 953 girls for every 1,000 boys, in the general population. There are 932 girls to 1,000 boys under age 15 in the South Asian community. In Toronto Central, the girl-boy ratio is 917:1,000, and is 904:1000 in Mississauga, and 864:1,000 in Brampton.
It’s alarming and it’s happening. It’s not just a theory, belief, or biased information released from a special interest group.
But what is it that’s causing the stir in the general public? Not that this is happening, not that thousands of girls are prevented from being born, not that mothers are being forced to abort them with the threat of divorce and abandonment, and not that we’re getting a serious male-heavy population that will only further skew the ratio in generations to come, but that everyone else has to suffer because of a few. And when I say “suffer”, of course I mean that people don’t know whether to buy pink or blue stuff for Baby. Of course, if they invoke the 30-week rule, it would have to be for everyone.
This is what it comes down to: people can’t wait an extra 10 weeks to find out the sex of their baby because they need to get that nursery decorated and they need to know:?princesses or airplanes?
I’ve read a few different opinions on this in the last day, and one said that the medical community shouldn’t be weighing in on this at all, but that a cultural shift needs to happen. I agree, but not only in the patriarchal communities and countries, but everywhere else too. Because other than the decorating, what does it matter what the sex is?
And even at 30 weeks along, parents still have another seven to 10 weeks to shop to their heart’s content. Baby doesn’t care what colour his or her room is, or whether their bib has a ducky or a dumptruck on it. They just want food and love (in that order).
If it were up to me, the only information I would give parents would pertain to the health of the ba