Choice?

Can I ask you to do something difficult? Try to forget how you feel about issues of freedom of choice in various contexts for a moment. What I'd like to do is to consider the logical implications of the following two stories.

The first is from a guy I went to university with named  André Picard. He writes about a provocative essay that appeared in the Huffington Post and asked whether breast augmentation surgery was a form of mutilation.

Sure, conditions are far more sanitary at Western plastic-surgery clinics where women’s breasts are sliced and “enhanced” than in dirt-poor villages in the developing world where girls and young women have their clitorises and labia excised ritualistically.

Yes, the breast augmentation is done voluntarily, but then so too is much female genital mutilation. But both practices are driven by ingrained notions of a woman’s place in society, the quest for an ideal of beauty/sexuality and social/religious norms. 

The consequence of believing this, it is important to remember,  would be to suggest that we might take this choice away from women.

Okay but how is this different from getting a  tattoo? Or, to make it really challenging, how is the woman who goes under the knife to get her breasts "enhanced" different from the woman who goes under the knife because she wants to "live as a man"?

Well there is an implied answer to that in the excerpt above. For the objection here is not really to the mutilation but for the reasons it is done. It's not really the mutilation that is objected to but the "ingrained notions of a woman’s place in society" and that is further specified as "the quest for an ideal of beauty/sexuality and social/religious norms".

Hey guys, did you know that you were attracted to large breasts because of social/religious norms? It's funny because when I was fourteen I got the distinct feeling that every social/religious norm out there was chastising me for being so interested in breasts.

And the expression "an ideal of" is doing a lot of work in the phrase "the quest for an ideal of beauty/sexuality". To see how much work, consider the phrase that we get if we take it out:

the quest for beauty/sexuality

No one would question a woman's pursuit of that. By suggesting that it's just "an ideal of", André delegitimizes the woman's choice.

In other words, you are free to choose what you want so long as you choose the right thing.

Here is the second story:

An editorial in the Canadian Medical Association Journal is calling for doctors performing prenatal ultrasounds to conceal the sex of the baby for the first 30 weeks, to curb a trend toward "female feticide" in the Asian community.

While reaction to the idea of withholding such information from parents has been mixed, there appears to be broad agreement that the practice of female feticide should be eliminated.

As above, set aside your beliefs about the issue of abortion for a while and think about the logical implications of this.

For starters, note that it is apparently just fine to single out certain ethnic communities because you find behaviour patterns in these communities troubling. That's a rather big move if you think about it. Ask yourself, for example, if you'd accept a similar line of argument about crime in the black community?

And, again, ask yourself about the freedom of choice issue. If I have a right to do something that means I don't have to justify my reasons for doing it to you or anybody else. My rights cannot be limited simply because others believe I have bad reasons for exercising them or else they would cease to be rights.

A right can be limited if it risks hurting others. But who is hurt in this case? It can't be the fetus or else that would restrict the right to abortion generally. the whole pro-choice argument is founded on the assumption that the fetus has no separate status from its mother. And yet that claim vanishes like steam in this case.

Interim editor-in-chief of the CMAJ Dr. Rajendra Kale writes.

"A woman has the right to medical information about herself . . . (but) the sex of the fetus is medically irrelevant information — except when managing rare sex-linked illnesses — and does not affect care." 

But care of whom? If a woman has control over her own body then the only relevant care issue is what she wants for her body.

Of course we all know that there is a feminist concern here and I'd add that the concern is entirely legitimate. But again, let's consider the logical implications. There has been quite a trend towards feticide in general these last few decades. in fact, if some pro-life group started calling abortion "feticide" you can bet pro-choicers would scream blue murder about how this label was freighting what ought to be an argument about rights with emotion. Why is something that is generally supposed to be a right become wrong when a woman chooses abortion based on the sex of the fetus?

And what about consistency? If we take the pursuit of male children through selective abortion of female fetuses as effecting the rights of women generally then don't we have to take the pursuit of healthy children through the selective abortion of fetuses with a high risk of Down's Syndrome as affecting the rights of those with disabilities generally? Do some identities matter more than others?

Again, the message here is that you have the right to choose so long as you do so for the right reasons.