Ossitania wrote:We want the ability to jail people who have sex-selective abortions because this ability is a deterrent to communities who practice sex-selective abortion: it is simply not the case that any attempt to curtail sex-selective abortion will focus on individuals in the way you conceptualise it. The only evidence that will ever exist that anyone is practicing sex-selective abortion is a discernible pattern of sex-selective abortion. If a pattern is the only evidence, no one will ever want to leave a pattern, as doing so would result in their prosecution, ergo the fact that we can send someone to jail for practicing sex-selective abortion means that we'll almost never have to do so, and when we do, it will be to punish people so dedicated to weakening the position of women in future generations that they're willing to risk getting caught to do so.
So you accept that what you propose is a huge interference in the rights of a woman. 1) The woman, not this wooly and undefined collective, is prosecuted. 2) If there's a general pattern towards one gender or the other then no woman can abort that gender, thereby automatically preventing half of all women from exercising their rights over their bodies! So half of women are free to have abortions, the other half can't because of some demographic trend across wider society. What you propose is to subordinate the rights of the individual to the rights of wider society. I simply can't agree with the rights on the individual being subordinated to the collective in such a fashion.
And not only that, but you want to change WA law to permit this!
Regarding your general unorthodox** misinterpretation of the target resolution. It is all very interesting but we don't agree. Although if you maintain that the resolution lets nations do whatever they like, then surely you also maintain that nations can ban sex-selective abortions with it in place?
The effects of each clause of the resolution taken together, particularly the recognises, mandates, and demands clauses make it clear that any individual has the right to have an abortion when they want it. In all your nightmare scenarios of nations forcing woman to do this, that and the other, not once have you given due weight to the demands clause. Nations cannot allow impediment to termination that are "not applied to medical procedures of similar risk and complexity". Particularly relating to earlier stage abortions which are more straightforward and less risky than later stage abortions, we fail to see how erecting all sorts of barriers is permissible under the target resolution unless those barriers are also applied to virtually all medical procedures.
OOC: ** I say unorthodox as it's not a specific interpretation of GAR#286 I've seen before. Ofc the originality of an argument doesn't mean it's right or wrong, but it is worth noting that in all the debates on GAR#286, from it's original thread right through, literally no one has ever managed to credibly propose that GAR#286 permits nations not to allow abortions.
