"The tests, scientists say, are the latest incarnation of old wives' tales about salty food cravings, hairy legs and belly shapes denoting the sex of the impending baby. This time, the predictions are being sold with the patina of cutting-edge genetic technology."
     From "Accuracy of gender test kits in question," Los Angeles Times, February 24.

"How does a taboo begin to die?"
     From "Abortion and your right to accurate sex selection," by William Saletan published February 25 at slate.com.

I would not have seen the Los Angeles Times story by Karen Kaplan, had I not run across the column by William Saletan. With Saletan you never know what you're going to get, but in this instance he has a very shrewd take on what Kaplan calls the "booming genomics industry" which has proven to be a haven for hucksters.

Our concern here is not with the panoply of absurd predictions various companies are making about everything from "personalized dieting plans" to "the sports for which one is best suited." It isn't even the issue of whether parents should be investigating whether their growing unborn child is a boy or a girl.

It actually even goes beyond what is done with that knowledge. Obviously, if we oppose abortion, we'd surely be steadfastly against taking a child's life because the little one is the "wrong'" sex": a boy when a girl is wanted, or (more typically) a girl when a boy is desired.

If there can be gradations to degradations, sex-selection abortions may be the worst of them all.

But Saletan's very keen observations begin with the fact that abortion is not the focus of Kaplan's story. "Termination" certainly is in the background, although the women quoted tell Kaplan they would not have aborted had they known that the child was not the "preferred" sex.

"The focus of the article is that these tests often err," Saletan writes. "The very idea of elective prenatal sex-testing used to be controversial, especially in light of rampant sex-selective abortion in Asia. Now these tests are being bought, used, and reported just like any other prenatal test. The couples who use them are described just as sympathetically. The problem isn't that they're screening their offspring for sex. The problem is that in doing so they're being thwarted by flawed technology and exaggerated marketing."

He continues: "As technology makes it possible to break the sex-selection taboo privately and inexpensively, the practice spreads, and we get used to it. The question of whether to restrict it becomes, as with other prenatal tests, a mere question of consumer protection."

This is kind of a backwards variation of Ben Franklin's "For the want of a nail, the shoe was lost; for the want of a shoe the horse was lost; and for the want of a horse the rider was lost, being overtaken and slain by the enemy, all for the want of care about a horseshoe nail"-- only on a much larger and more lethal scale.

If abortion is a "right" exercised upon a "thing" (or at least on something that is not "fully human"), what difference does it make why, or on what basis, that right is exercised? Here's an analogy: I choose Coke over Pepsi, and if some distributor mistakes or mislabels the soft drinks, my right has been infringed, right?

While it may make some people (actually countless millions) squirm to abort a child because she is a girl rather than a boy, if that is legal, surely I ought to be able to sue some company if its tests guaranteeing me that the growing child meets my gender-specific demands fail.

Not much else to say except to remind ourselves once again not only that abortion is hideous in its own terms but also  that corrupts everything it touches.

Please send your thoughts to me at daveandrusko@hotmail.com