Abortion

Baroness Rendell of Babergh Excerpts

Thursday 3rd April 2014 Grand Committee

[Baroness Rendell of Babergh (Lab)]

My Lords, I thank the noble Baroness, Lady Knight, for introducing this debate. Worldwide, women are still not the favoured gender. When my husband was in the Royal Navy and was stationed in Hong Kong soon after the end of the Second World War, he saw the bodies of drowned baby girls floating in the harbour. This was long before the arrival of the cheap ultrasound machine which is imported from China to India. Two thousand female foetuses are aborted every day in India.

This is not new. Demographic statistics first collected in the 19th century in some Indian villages show that no girl babies were found alive. A girl is regarded as a drain on a family’s resources. Some are killed before or after birth to avoid paying a dowry when she would have married, and some because parents lose a potential pension when a daughter leaves her home to join her husband and she can no longer care for them in their old age.

There are now reports that sex-selective abortion is happening in the UK. A study by University of Oxford academics has suggested that Indian women in the UK were aborting more female than male foetuses between 1990 and 2005. That is so concerning that the Council of Europe has suggested that member states stop giving parents information on the gender of unborn babies until late in pregnancy. Such preference for sons over daughters has tipped the natural 50:50 balance in some ethnic communities.

Will the noble Earl give an assurance that the Government take this matter seriously and will he undertake to keep it under close observation, bearing in mind that unsafe abortion results in 47,000 deaths worldwide?