Replacing Myths with Facts: Sex-Selective Abortion Laws in the United States
Laws banning sex-selective abortion are proliferating in the United States. Eight states have enacted laws prohibiting sex-selective abortion. Twenty-one states and the federal government have considered such laws since 2009. Those laws prohibit the performance of an abortion if sought based on the sex of the fetus and provide for both criminal and civil penalties in most cases.A great deal of misinformation exists regarding sex selection in the United States. In this report, we have identified six inaccuracies commonly associated with sex-selective abortion and laws prohibiting it. They appear, among other places, in statements made by legislators, testimony submitted to legislatures, and reports issued by legislative committees that have considered or adopted laws banning sex-selective abortion.This Report draws on legal research, empirical analysis of U.S. birth data, field-work, and an extensive review of scholarly publications in social sciences, law and other disciplines to replace these myths with facts.The main empirical support for the view that Asian Americans are obtaining sex-selective abortions based on son preference in the United States is from a study by economists Douglas Almond and Lena Edlund published in 2008. That study, using United States census data from 2000, found that when foreign-born Chinese, Indians and Koreans have two girls, the sex ratios at the third birth in those families is skewed towards boys. However, in analyzing more recent data from the 2007 to 2011 American Community Survey (ACS), we found that the sex ratios at birth of foreign-born Chinese, Indians and Koreans are not male-biased when all their births are taken into account. In fact, foreign-born Chinese, Indians and Koreans have proportionally more girls than white Americans.
The consequences of son preference and sex-selective abortion in China and other Asian countries
Parents’ preference for sons is common in countries in East Asia through South Asia, to the Middle East and North Africa. Sons are preferred because they have a higher wage-earning capacity (especially in agrarian economies), they continue the family line and they usually take responsibility for
The Three Faces of Defeasibility in the Law
In this paper we will analyse the issue of defeasibility in the law, taking into account research carried out in philosophy, artificial intelligence and legal theory. We will adopt a very general idea of legal defeasibility, in which we will include all different ways in which certain legal conclusions may need to be abandoned, though no mistake was made in deriving them. We will argue that defeasibility in the law involves three different aspects, which we will call inference-based defeasibility, process-based defeasibility, and theory-based defeasibility. Only the integration of these three perspectives allows us to provide a satisfactory account of the role of defeasibility in legal reasoning.