Is It All Right to Abort a Lesbian Baby?

What if the “born gay” fallacy was true and it was possible to identify a “gay baby” in the womb? Would the flaming liberals who so fiercely cling to a woman’s “right to choose” affirm her “right” to abort a gay fetus?

There is now a ridiculous TV commercial airing in Australia that allows this question to be asked, although that is surely a totally unintended consequence of the ad.

The commercial shows an expectant mom and dad in the doctor’s office having an ultrasound. After informing the parents that everything looks good, the doctor asks the beaming couple, “Now, would you like to know what you’re having?”

When they say they would, the doctor replies, “You’re having a lesbian”—to the parents’ great joy. In fact, as the camera moves out of the room, you can hear the expectant mother proudly say, “A lesbian … ” (You can watch the commercial here. Seeing is believing—or maybe not.)

The words on the screen then read: “Any child can be born gay. So marriage equality is every family’s issue.”

Of course, the premise of the ad is completely preposterous, as there remains no reputable scientific evidence that children are born gay or lesbian, let alone a test (or ultrasound!) that could determine homosexuality in the womb.

And it has been demonstrated both anecdotally and clinically that there is much more sexual fluidity among women than men, meaning that a woman might move from heterosexual to homosexual and back over the course of a lifetime (or vice versa). So much for being “born lesbian.”

It is with good reason, then, that lesbian author Camille Paglia famously wrote, “No one is born gay. The idea is ridiculous.”

But for the sake of argument, and to go along with the absurd premise of the commercial, what if homosexuality was innate and there was a test to identify gay babies? Would it be acceptable to abort a gay fetus? Where would liberals stand on this moral issue?

As I noted in my book A Queer Thing Happened to America, “In 2008, Southern Baptist leader Al Mohler created a firestorm of controversy when he suggested that if it was determined that people were born homosexual, then perhaps a treatment for homosexuality could be found.  Gay activists were outraged by his comments (is anyone surprised?), and he even came under attack from conservatives who felt he had capitulated to the ‘born that way’ theory.

“But let’s think about this for a moment: If it is OK to put a girl with gender identity disorder on medication to delay the onset of puberty, then, as a teenager, to offer her sex-change surgery, then to put her on hormonal medication the rest of her life, why would it be wrong to look for a medical ‘treatment’ for homosexuality? And why would it be wrong to begin such treatment in the womb?

“Why is one treatment—a far more radical one!—fully acceptable while another one—far less radical and invasive—unacceptable? Why is one, which involves genital mutilation, applauded as progressive while the other, which does not affect the physical body at all, considered regressive? …

“If a gay person could be saved the stigma of rejection in a heterosexual world and could have new desires that would allow him or her to have offspring with the person he or she loves simply by getting a series of injections, wouldn’t it be worth it?”

All such talk, of course, is completely off limits (simply stated, if homosexuality is not a sickness, it doesn’t need a cure), but if gay activists want to push their “born gay” argument, then it’s only fair to ask if it’s morally acceptable to abort an allegedly gay fetus. Why not?

After all, in May, Democrats voted against a House bill “that sought to impose fines and prison terms on doctors who perform abortions on women who are trying to select the gender of their offspring—a practice known as sex-selective abortion.”

This coincided with the House vote: “The pro-life Live Action group released [an] undercover video … showing a Planned Parenthood clinic worker willing to help a woman abort her baby if it’s a girl.” As quoted on the video, the worker explains, “I can tell you that here at Planned Parenthood, we believe that it’s not up to us to decide what is a good or a bad reason for somebody to decide to terminate a pregnancy.”

Presumably, then, this same worker would have told the couple on the Australian commercial, “Of course, if you choose to abort your little lesbian, that would be fine as well.”

Perhaps the “born gay” argument is not where gay activists really want to go?

Michael Brown is author of The Real Kosher Jesus and host of the nationally syndicated talk radio show The Line of Fire on the Salem Radio Network. He is also president of FIRE School of Ministry and director of the Coalition of Conscience. Follow him at AskDrBrown on Facebook or @drmichaellbrown on Twitter.