Sikhism Ethical Issues

This deficit of women has resulted in a bride trafficking practice where women from villages are bought and sometimes kidnapped to be sold as brides to men. In regions like Punjab, the sex ratio is so skewed towards men that wives are often shared between brothers or cousins. In 1994, the Indian government implemented Prenatal Diagnostic Techniques Act, which only allows pre-conception tests to identify a deformity in the fetus. Although this law still continues to be broken, women’s rights movements have grown in strength. In addition to women’s rights movements, Sikh religious leaders are seeking to outlaw abortions of female fetuses. Although the Sikh scripture, the Guru Granth, does not outlaw abortion, it seems to draw attention to this …show more content…
Another very important belief in Sikhism is the view of one’s identity being closely tied to the family, culture, and environment, which is also very different from the western view or autonomy and has important implications for the creation of a global bioethics. The simplest implication is that in Sikhism, individual decisions involve the family, and even the extended family. Questions would also arise of how the decision would assimilate into the culture and affect the environment. A global bioethics would have to somehow compromise between the western view of a patient’s right to autonomy and the Sikh view of involvement of the family. If we again look at the issue of abortion, in the West, abortion is a private decision to be made by the woman in conjunction with her spouse or parents if she wishes. However, in Sikhism, abortion would be a family decision, and most likely would be made by the men in the family since it is a patriarchal society. The decision of whether or not to get an abortion would also take the culture into consideration, meaning this view could perpetuate the problem of sex-selection in India, since that is the culture that Sikhs are surrounded