abortion, religion and souls

[Sherry Listgarten]

> i feel that having
> funerals for abortions would help people feel better about 
> it, and would allow respect for
> potential life to be observed.

I read a mind-blowing statistic about the cause of a very large number of
abortions recently, which makes me wonder whether the parents would consider
a funeral appropriate in those cases. From the 11/23 NY Times:

** Begin article section **

The debate here over the ethics of using new technologies to pick the sex of
a child echoes one that has been going on in the United States since the
American Society for Reproductive Medicine recently endorsed the use of in
vitro fertilization techniques to help parents determine the sex of their
second child, so long as it's the opposite of the first child.

But the danger of such methods seems even more acute to authorities here
because of new findings in India's 2001 census. The results show that the
ratio of girls to boys in the richest states of the north and west has
fallen sharply over the past decade, a phenomenon that most experts
attribute to the rising use of ultrasound tests to determine the sex of a
fetus and the abortion of females.

For example, the ratio of girls to boys 6 years old and under has declined
to 793 girls per 1,000 boys from 875 in Punjab and to 878 from 928 in
Gujarat.

** End article section **

The full article, free for a limited time, is at:
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/11/23/international/asia/23INDI.html?searchpv=pa
st7days

Similar goings-on in China.

-- Sherry.