Sex selective abortion - SNP review of Scottish law

[ArabellaSaurus]

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/2025/11/14/abortions-based-on-sex-legalised-plans-snp/

'a report commissioned by the Scottish Government recommends ...establishing an automatic right to an abortion and listing a set of scenarios where it would not be allowed.
The expert review published on Friday said any future legislation should not include any explicit prohibition on sex-selective abortion.
Prof Annie Glasier, who chaired the review, said that the group believed it was “unnecessary” and “potentially harmful” to explicitly prohibit the practice.

She said there was a lack of evidence of it taking place in Scotland, adding that enforcing it would also be difficult because it would require “intrusive and inappropriate questioning” of those seeking an abortion.
She also raised concerns that it would risk “racial profiling” women from particular communities where sex-selective abortion is thought to take place.'

The Review:

https://www.gov.scot/publications/review-abortion-law-scotland-expert-group-report/pages/5/

Thirdly, I don’t think this is just an ‘Asian’ thing. There seems to be a strong culture in white women of wanting girls, to the extent I’ve read threads where women sobbed when finding out they were having a boy, or say they ‘can’t love their baby as they could only love a girl’. This seems to be getting worse over time, and I really think gender selection IVF and similar will become more commonplace (abroad) as women fly from the UK to ensure they ‘get their girl’

I’m sure there has been a case of a white woman aborting due to the sex but I’d imagine (until I saw any kind of stats) that it was such a rarity. Asian countries like India and China have actual issues of girls been aborted and the stats show it with male populations being bigger in some or all areas.

Gender disappointment threads on MN, in my experience, never bring up abortion. They’re often someone saying they’ll love their baby but they’re disappointed as they wanted a girl.

I’m not sure of evidence that women wanting girls is getting worse. I think it’s always been fairly common for women to want girls and men to want boys, but the internet didn’t always exist for people to post about it.

Whilst abortions can be done on request, and I think they should, it’s important enough to make a statement of values, that abortion for sex selection is not acceptable.

Aren’t all laws broken anyway? They’re still worth having just to state how we should live: not murdering and stealing and fly tipping and aborting females.

They might say that but that’s because they know the outrage they would provoke if they said they were considering abortion. It doesn’t mean they’re telling the truth necessarily.

@HearMeOutt
Well if there are substantial numbers doing it like in some Asian countries it will become apparent until then it’s just speculation.

Is the system set up to collect the data on this?

Is the sex of the child recorded at any stage as these are not still borns with a register record.

No I don’t think you’d be able to record the stats for this.

As I said upthread, I had an abortion at 6 weeks. I could have been doing that following a private blood test that told me the sex of the baby. If I was doing it for that reason (I wasn’t, to be clear), the NHS wouldn’t have known that, and would have no way of knowing the sex of the baby so they couldn’t even look at “what % of abortions are of female foetuses” to see if it’s disproportionate.

I’d imagine the number of people having an abortion following the NHS 20 week scan where they’ve been told the sex is so small. Almost all abortions after that point are for health reasons.

While it's not something you can forcibly prevent, it's absolutely necessary to make it unlawful. It's not just about the parents, but also providers.

I also agree with PP that I've never heard of general gender disappointment translating into abortion on that basis. It's also not new - my dad openly stated he would never love his daughter as much as he loved his son, nearly 50 years ago.

I think the way to collect data on this / the way it would become apparent would be through the live birth data. If large numbers of White British women were aborting their boys due to "gender disappointment" then a disparity in the numbers of boys vs girls being born would become evident. We wouldn't need the numbers of boys vs girls being aborted.

To respond to @TempestTost , it would be extremely difficult to get an abortion because your baby has an extra finger. That would only be picked up at the 20 week scan, and I dont know of any doctors who would sign off on that meeting the legal grounds for abortion. I have encountered women in a professional capacity who have been pursuing an abortion for a "minor" congenital anomaly like this, and have not been able to find two doctors to sign off on it. One was for a cleft palate, so not what most would consider "minor", on the basis that it was surgically repairable without a significant impact on the child's quality of life, so did not meet the legal requirements. So it's not as easy as people think at later gestations.

Legally, abortion providers are supposed to ask the reason for the abortion. In practice I think the assumption is often that pre-12-weeks it's because the baby/pregnancy isn't wanted, and the forms are completed on the basis that continuing the pregnancy would have a severe adverse effect on the pregnant woman's mental health.

I don’t really understand how anyone could possibly do anything to stop it. Certainly fine to say that it’s not a great reason, but if it was explicitly banned a woman could just say anything else if asked why. What would banning it even mean and how could it possibly be enforced?

Personally I don’t think anyone should be asked to justify their choice anyway and abortion should be fully legalised and available to anyone who wants one.

@Cvntrue the live birth data could be used

• *I suspect that hospitals in some areas had already run that data on an unofficial basis when choosing not to sex the child in scans.
  But it would be a political issue if race and sex were being co-analysed so although the data may be collectable by the health system.

@PurpleThistle7 as a prior poster pointed out the ban would be more about the provider being prevented from providing the optional service than from preventing an individual woman from using abortion to only have a child of the "correct/wanted" sex.

And on your second paragraph I assume you are not suggesting that men should have access to abortion?

Personally I don’t think anyone a woman should be asked to justify their her choice anyway and abortion should be fully legalised and available to anyone women who wants one.

I was meaning through the children born not aborted, like @Cvn said there’d be a noticeable difference in boys and girls born. I imagine that’s how it was picked up in some of those Asian countries rather than through records of abortions etc.

RoamingToaster.
The data skew would likely be by ethnic group so within the powers that be would have to make a political decision to run the numbers within each group and that would likely not be signed off on a political basis.

Because you can does not make aborting on grounds of sex (excepting sex-linked life-threatening disabilities) right. I am not sure a woman has an absolute right to abort her child and maybe we should not be enshrining such an idea in law. The original purpose of the Abortion Act in the 60s was to help women whose husbands would not use contraception, who had several children already and were unable to cope with another child (think 6 or 7 children), or who were in abusive relationships where pregnancy was being used as a weapon of control by men - living in abject poverty was also part of these awful scenarios. Difficult, horrible choices - but not abortion just because you want one.
It was assumed the number of abortions would be low and that as contraception improved and attitudes to out of wedlock pregnancies changed that abortion would almost never be needed. What we have now would have appalled the instigators of the Act.

If sex-selection abortion is allowed in some communities it will happen. Both India and China, where sex-selective abortion happens the imbalance between the sexes is now a problem, resulting not in women being more valued but in them being treated as commodities that can be bought/grabbed by a man as his possession just because he wants one. For some reason the market scarcity increases the price/value rule does not apply to women.

Bloody hell. I'm very sorry.

To abort a healthy baby because of its female sex shows the world that girls and women are still considered the inferior Essex.

Thirdly, I don’t think this is just an ‘Asian’ thing. There seems to be a strong culture in white women of wanting girls, to the extent I’ve read threads where women sobbed when finding out they were having a boy, or say they ‘can’t love their baby as they could only love a girl’. This seems to be getting worse over time, and I really think gender selection IVF and similar will become more commonplace (abroad) as women fly from the UK to ensure they ‘get their girl’

I agree. Some of the posts about gender disappointment are quite disturbing. Sex-selective abortion is probably more common than society likes to admit. The pattern probably doesn't show up in the statistics because the white women who abort their sons are cancelled out by Asian women aborting their daughters.

They will be able to identify white women having girls at a higher rate than normal as they were able to identify boys born at a higher rate than average with certain Asian populations. If it’s a recent change it will become apparent in time.

Here is an example of how they identified an issue in the UK:

Office for National Statistics (ONS) Analysis (2015): The ONS reported a significant sex ratio imbalance at birth (SRB) among UK-born children of Pakistani mothers, with 108.4 boys per 100 girls in 2012—higher than the natural global average of 105. This pattern was not seen in the general population but aligned with trends in parts of India and Pakistan. Researchers attributed it to sex-selective abortions, estimating 100–1,800 "missing" girls annually in the UK.

I also think the culture is different in regards to gender disappointment and that might affect the likelihood of abortions.
I wouldn’t say it’s an overall cultural preference to have girls in western culture the way it is with boys in some other cultures. It’s just coming from a group of women. You don’t get men disappointed in the same way if they don’t have a girl. These women if they want an abortion therefore have to get their husbands onboard with the idea of aborting until it’s a girl or they don’t tell them which throws up all kinds of issues as well. These are two big roadblocks to it being more popular I believe. This is different to it being an overall cultural preference where both parents are aligned in wanting a boy.

Thanks, Toaster. There are readily accessible stats on these issues.

Here is an article on populations globally that mentions the issue.

https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2022/08/31/global-population-skews-male-but-un-projects-parity-between-sexes-by-2050/

UAE apparently has 228 males per 100 females.
Qatar at 266 males per 100 females.

Conversely, Russia has 87 males per 100 females. Partly due to war deaths.

Article here on 'son preference' in India, and how that is changing, for various reasons:

'A recent Pew Research Center report took a closer look at the sex ratio at birth in India, specifically. India’s artificially wide ratio of baby boys to baby girls – which arose in the 1970s from the use of prenatal diagnostic technology to facilitate sex-selective abortions – now appears to be narrowing. This follows years of government efforts to curb sex selection, including a ban on prenatal sex tests and a massive advertising campaign urging parents to “save the girl child,” and coincides with broader social changes such as rising education and wealth. '

https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2022/08/23/indias-sex-ratio-at-birth-begins-to-normalize/

'Naturally, boys modestly outnumber girls at birth, at a ratio of approximately 105 male babies for every 100 female babies. That was the ratio in India in the 1950s and 1960s, before prenatal sex tests became available across the country.2
In the 1970s, prenatal gender tests, conducted using amniocentesis, were rare and expensive. Since the introduction of ultrasound technology in the 1980s, gender testing has become more widespread and affordable.

Abortion was legalized in the country in 1971. Once prenatal testing allowed Indian families to learn the sex of a fetus during pregnancy, sex selection took off. The sex ratio at birth widened rapidly from about 105 boys per 100 girls before 1970, to 108 boys per 100 girls in the early 1980s; it reached 110 in the 1990s and remained at that level for roughly 20 years.

...
Around the world, sex selection is often attributed to “son preference” (or “daughter aversion”), a form of gender bias in which families prioritize having sons over daughters for economic, historical or religious reasons. ...

Even though it has been illegal in India since 1996 for doctors and other medical practitioners to reveal the sex of a fetus to the prospective parents, at least 9.0 million (0.9 crore) female births went “missing” between 2000 and 2019 because of female-selective abortions, according to a Pew Research Center analysis of data from multiple waves of the NFHS and India’s census.'

That’s very presumptuous of you. Who’s to say what ‘pain, discomfort and/or misery’ a child with, say, Down Syndrome may have? An anomaly scan won’t tell you, Amniocentesis won’t tell you.
There are myriad reasons why a woman may not want to continue with a pregnancy. If someone is pro choice, they cannot then dictate what that choice should be based on.

With lots of scan places for "gender reveal" nonsense it doesn't matter what the hospitals do.

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-15294853/SNP-talks-sex-selection-abortion-legal.html

Yes, thank you, that's interesting that practically it would be difficult to actually get a doctor to agree to perform the abortion. However, I think my point stands that for anything that was caught earlier on, it would be totally up to the mother to decide if she thought it was a problem, no matter how minor it was.

I'd also say that a significant contingent of people think that feminism necessarily means abortion at will up until birth, and for those who think that way, it seems impossible to justify restricting it on the basis of sex..

https://abortionrights.org.uk/selecting-data-misrepresenting-narratives-on-sex-selective-abortion/

'The issue of SSA in the UK was brought to the attention of the wider public due to the media and political campaign that occurred from 2012-2015. However, a 2014 report concluded that, “no group is statistically different from the range that we would expect to see naturally occurring” in the UK This was again confirmed by the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care in 2020.
The prevalence of SSA in the UK is determined by the sex ratio at birth (SRB)*. In the UK, the SRB figures were evidence that SSA is not a reality within the UK and that therefore there was no justification in explicitly prohibiting SSA within the law, under the Crimes Act.'