Swedish health authorities have ruled that it is not illegal to kill a healthy unborn child based simply on its gender, according to Swedish news service The Local.
Doctors had asked health authorities about the matter after a woman from southern Sweden had two of her children killed in utero for being an undesired sex. The woman had already given birth to two daughters.
The gender was determined during an amniocentesis requested to determine whether the child had a disability.
Concerned doctors at Mälaren Hospital then asked Sweden’s National Board of Health and Welfare to determine a protocol for future instances in which they “feel pressured to examine the foetus’s gender” without a medical necessity.
The medical board responded that such requests must be accommodated.
According to Swedish law, abortion is legal on any basis whatsoever up to the 18th week of gestation, and therefore the board said doctors cannot deny a mother seeking to have an unborn child killed because it is the wrong gender.
A medical ethics consultant told The Local in March that mothers regularly travel to Sweden from Norway, where sex-selective abortions are illegal, to abort unwanted girls.
