Gendercide

Michael Stokes Paulson writes at the Weekly Standard that

Today marks the fortieth anniversary of Roe v. Wade, the Supreme Court decision establishing a constitutional right to abortion. Advocates of Roe and abortion rights frequently portray abortion as a matter of “women’s rights” or as a “women’s issue.”

Worldwide, sex-selection abortion is distressingly common. Each year, millions of abortions are committed because the child is discovered to be a female, a fact now easily revealed by ultrasound early in pregnancy. Statistically, it is clear that abortion is widely used specifically to prevent the births specifically of baby of girls. In 1991, Harvard economist Amartya Sen examined birth-ratio disparities and demonstrated that “More Than 100 Million Women are Missing” (the title of his New York Review of Books article). Today the number of missing and presumed dead stands at 160 million women and girls – undesired females killed by abortion or infanticide. The incidence of sex-selection abortion of girls is more pronounced in certain Asian populations, but it exists in western nations as well, including the United States.

The reality of sex-selection abortion assaults the premises underlying the abortion-rights position. The “women’s rights” argument doubles back on itself in this setting. A right to abortion, in the name of gender equality, ends up being a right to abort girls because they are girls. What does that do to the notion that abortion advances gender equality and women’s rights? If abortion on the basis of the sex of the child to be born – killing girls because they are not boys – is not sex discrimination and gender-based violence, it is hard to know what is. And if abortion produces a gender-skewed human population, a world in which women and girls are systemically culled and their percentage of the population reduced – and it does – it is very hard to think this an advance for women’s freedom and equality. Demographers and some feminists have coined a term for this war on women: gendercide.

Recognizing that the fetus has a gender, as a girl or boy, is a giant step toward recognizing the essential humanity of the unborn child. Think about it for a moment. Why exactly, is sex-selection abortion wrong? At bottom, the reason must be that the human fetus is more than an “it.” It’s a girl, or a boy. And once that is recognized the game is up.

Read more here: http://www.weeklystandard.com/blogs/war-women_697467.html?page=2