Who will bake the cookies?

China has made selective sex abortions illegal. The potent combination of a one-child policy and capital-P Patriarchy means that 119 boys are born in China for every 100 girls, a ratio the government is attempting to change:

"The government takes it as an urgent task to correct the gender imbalance of newborns," the official Xinhua news agency quoted Zhang Weiqing, minister in charge of the National Population and Family Planning Commission

Because I am in a rush and because my friends are so smart, I will give you their thoughts here. The story came to me in an email that said this:

How do we feel about this? On the one hand, it's a victory over misogynist medicine. On the other, it's a blow against reproductive choice in a place where there's already not much of that (and where choice and abortion have a very different relationship to one another than they do here...)

To which there was a reply from another really smart friend that included this:

Probably the only reason the government wants to put a stop to sex-selective abortions is that they worry there won't be enough women to clean and cook and twiddle the wee-wees of Chinese men.

I'm thinking maybe Cosgrove should move to China. He'd have a field day with legislation there. Anyway, talk amongst yourselves...