Pro-Life Works: Gendercide

March 15, 2010

Abortion: Gendercide's Greatest Tool

March 8 marked the 29th World Women’s Day.  Although the commemoration is well deserved, and the day is used to bring awareness to atrocities committed against women, it was created and is used most often by third and fourth generation feminists who believe that the right to abortion is the ultimate holy grail of ‘women’s rights’.  They see the ‘right to choose’ as tantamount to the right to vote.  This same generation of feminists also condemns the oppression of females across the world, focusing on the injustice of the stoning of rape victims in the Middle East, women being deprived of education on the basis of their gender, global sex trafficking, and gendercide, which is sex selective abortion.

Sex selective abortion is most rampant in Asia, primarily in India and China, where there is a cultural preference for males.  Males can help with manual labor, carry the family name and line, and unlike females, will not require an expensive, burdensome dowry for the family to pay when the time comes to marry.  While ultrasound technology has proven invaluable to the fight against abortion in America, that same technology has resulted in higher rates of sex-selective abortion in other countries.  A March 4, 2010 article in The Economist magazine, entitled ‘War On Baby Girls’, shows that China now has a birthrate of 100 girls for every 120 boys, and in India, the number has risen from an equal ratio of boys to girls in 1980 to 110 boys to 100 girls in 2009.  This same discrepancy has also spread across Eastern Europe and the Middle East.  This skewed birthrate has been made possible only by greater access to abortion, and millions of pre-born girls have lost their lives because of gendercide.

The International Planned Parenthood Federation of America has been instrumental in bringing “the universal right to choose and the right to safe abortion” to women in other countries, yet abortion has become the most widely used tool used against pre-born women.  The largest abortion mill in the world is run by Planned Parenthood in Beijing, China; the facility operates ‘to support the present family planning policies of the government,’ the same draconian one-child policy that results in both forced abortion upon China’s citizens, and in the abortion of unborn women.  In a country where only one child may be legally born to a family, and the preference for male children has been dominant for centuries, it is an odious thing indeed that Planned Parenthood would aid with the implementation of such policies.

When examining American liberal feminists’ attitudes toward abortion, we see the strongest, most vehement supporters of the right to choose abortion.  When abortion is committed in America and other first-world countries, they consider it a choice women deserve to have, yet when this same procedure is committed in other countries in the name of gender selection, it is a war upon women.  A popular feminist website, feminist.com, put together a list of injustices against women, entitled ‘Facts of Violence.’  Here is fact Number 31: “At least 60 million girls who would otherwise be expected to be alive are "missing" from various populations, mostly in Asia, as a result of sex-selective abortions, infanticide or neglect”.  (UN Study on The Status of Women, Year 2000)

Where is the consistency?  Why is it only violence against women when female fetuses are being aborted in the name of gender selection, and not in the name of choice?  The first generation of feminists, such as Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, considered abortion to be a great crime against both women and children.  Even Margaret Sanger called abortion “the horror of abortion….hundreds of thousands of abortions performed in America each year are a disgrace to civilization.”  Yet present liberal feminist values celebrate the right to abortion.  While some women fight for the right to make abortion accessible all over the world, millions more women are condemned to death by never being born.  It is time to realize that the right to abortion has never been the greatest right a woman could have, and that abortion itself is the greatest tool for the destruction of pre-born women. 

Stephanie M. Hernandez

College Intern