Chinese advertisements

[kirisutogomen]

The answer is the tag, rot13'd, but to save you the trouble, I'll tell you. First, the original ad before I mucked with it. (Yes, it was left-right mirrored like most people guessed. I'm still curious as to why among people who are entirely illiterate in Han characters the mirroring was blatantly obvious to some and not at all to others.)




And another for the same service from a competing provider:



These are ads for abortion clinics. Chinese abortion clinics advertise on prime-time television. They offer student discounts. Not sure if they have special holiday sales, nor if you get abortion coupons with your newspaper.

Now, unless you take the position that a fetus at any stage has the moral standing of a lintball but that magically at the moment the head crowns it suddenly becomes a full human person endowed with a complete set of inalienable rights plus a stylish carrying case, there's got to be a point at which you say, "Hrm. My liberal sensibilities tell me that I should advocate fiercely for a woman's right to choose, but I don't actually want people to treat abortion like a trip to the hair salon. What does my victory condition actually look like?"

And then there's the issue of sex selection, which really kicks over a Pandora's hornets' nest of other issues.

Comments

[twe.livejournal.com]

Did you follow the link in the post? The one that talks about how ultrasound + availability of safe abortions is causing crazy gender imbalances? If over 1/3 of female fetuses are being aborted early rather than late, has that somehow improved the situation?

[firstfrost.livejournal.com]

I do find the gender imbalance seriously troubling. But for my own moral qualms, yes, I think early abortion is an improvement over infanticide, and that does seem to be the other way of ensuring a son (especially under one child per family).

[twe.livejournal.com]

Yeah, though I gather infanticide is not actually all that common. Stealing of babies to be sold to westerners is possibly more common than infanticide. Also, apparently abortion for sex selection goes up with education and wealth, which I find even more troubling. (Sadly, much like vaccine refusal does.)

[psychohist.livejournal.com]

Infanticide in China was much more common before the widespread availability of abortions.