No, although if you make it difficult to obtain late term abortions, you sort of end up in the same place, unless medical science can determine the sex of a fetus in the first trimester.
Standard ultrasounds can usually discern the sex at around the end of the first trimester. Early amniocentesis could make the determination as early as the 10th or 11th week. Last but not least, there's a test that can be done using the mother's blood that is 98% accurate in determining a child's sex in the eighth week.
So despite what one might hope, limiting abortion to the first trimester does not do much to prevent sex-selective abortion.
Laws like this haven't worked anywhere in the world they've been tried for a very simple reason: You can always claim the abortion is because of something else.
I would probably support it anyway just for the symbolism of it.
True, altho if a ban on sex-selective abortions were focused on the abortionists, it would be possible to go after them if their ratio was too skewed.
Is the sex of the fetus really something that an abortion clinic keeps track of?Probably not, but it wouldn't be difficult to keep track of if clinics were required to. The development of the external genitalia becomes visible around the eighth week, and of course a chromosome test on the aborted tissue could be done if the abortion was done earlier.
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