The following appeared on Public Discourse, an
online publication of the Witherspoon Institute, a research center located in
Princeton, New Jersey.
The global pro-life movement will
continue to speak out and defend the girl child. We must work to oppose all
acts of gender based violence, protect women’s and girls’ lives, and seek
consistent non-discriminatory life-affirming laws and policies.
Today,
March 8, the UN’s International Women’s Day (IWD), pro-abortion organizations around
the world will tell us that women want and need universal access to abortion—
that it is their reproductive right. A number of international pro-abortion
organizations including the Population Institute, Ipas, CHANGE, Catholics for
Choice, Women Deliver and the Center for Reproductive Rights are staging a tweet fest today
using the hashtag #IWD2016 and claiming “Access to Safe and Legal Abortion is a
Human Right.”
Ignored
will be the millions of little women in the womb who are denied the most
critical human right—the right to life—and whose lives will be violently ended through
sex selection abortion. If these girls could speak, let alone sing, they would
surely tell the world, “Girls just want to be born.”
History and
scope of prenatal sex selection
These
girls would be joined by the chorus of over 160 million girls in Asia who
received a death sentence in acts of gendercide—elimination based on sex—simply
because they were not boys. Sex selection abortion is widely known to occur in
countries with a cultural preference for boys, especially China and India, but
the violent practice was not indigenous. Prenatal sex determination technology
was exported to these countries when the Population
Council recommended sex selection abortion as an “ethical” way to control
population.
In her book Unnatural
Selection: Choosing Boys Over Girls, and the Consequences of a World Full of
Men, Mara Hvistendahl explains the actions that transpired in the United States:
By August 1969, when the National Institute of Child Health and
Human Development and the Population Council convened another workshop on
population control, sex selection had become a pet scheme....Sex selection,
moreover, had the added advantage of reducing the number of potential
mothers....if a reliable sex determination technology could be made available
to a mass market, there was “rough consensus” that sex selection abortion “would
be an effective, uncontroversial and ethical way of reducing the global
population.”
The
scheme was successful. Today, millions of women in Asia are “missing”—never to dream,
play, work, or become mothers. The long term impact of the millions of “missing
girls” includes increased violence against women and girls with increases in
sex trafficking, forced prostitution, and the kidnapping and selling of women
and girls as brides.
There
is no disputing the link between sex selection abortion and the rise of
violence against women and girls. Organizations that work to stop gender based
violence (GBV) need look no further than the tragedy of prenatal sex selection
for the beginnings of GBV. But present day pro-abortion politics stand in the
way and prevent most from opposing this first act of violence based on gender.
The
unprecedented death of millions of girls has been equated to a “global war
against baby girls” by demographer Nicholas Eberstadt. He warns:
The practice has become so ruthlessly routine in many
contemporary societies that it has impacted their very population structures,
warping the balance between male and female births and consequently skewing the
sex ratios for the rising generation toward a biologically unnatural excess of
males. This still growing international predilection for sex-selective abortion
is by now evident in the demographic contours of dozens of countries around the
globe —and it is sufficiently severe that it has come to alter the overall sex
ratio at birth of the entire planet, resulting in millions upon millions of new
“missing baby girls” each year. In terms of its sheer toll in human numbers,
sex-selective abortion has assumed a scale tantamount to a global war against
baby girls.
For many women and girls in
China who survived the prenatal “search and destroy” missions of the global war
against baby girls, the state of their lives is dismal. China has one of the
highest female suicide rates in the world as 590 women a day ended their own
lives in 2012 according to the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention.
The elderly, especially women advanced in
years, suffer the loss of missing girls acutely. Millions of missing daughters
and daughters-in-law, who had they been allowed to be born, would likely be caregivers
today. With the breakdown of the family unit, the government struggles to
provide for elder care and security. The situation
for men seeking to marry and establish a family is also bleak, leading to
concerns about the demographic stability of China which the recent alleged
relaxation of its coercive one child population control policy to allow for two
approved births per couple cannot solve.
Opposition
to sex selection
Gains
were made in the global war on unborn baby girls at the Fourth World Conference
on Women held in Beijing in 1995. The Platform for Action unequivocally stated
opposition to the use of sex determination techniques to identify the presence
of an unborn baby girl in the womb leading to her subsequent death. Paragraph
38 addressed prenatal sex selection, clearly recognizing its detrimental effect
on women and girls stating, “Discrimination against women begins at the
earliest stages of life and must therefore be addressed from then onwards.”
The
World Conference on Women also recognized that son preference bias not only
discriminates against girls and limits a girl’s access to basic necessities,
but to “even life itself.” While global efforts to ensure girls’ access to
food, education and health care have been emphasized in universal agreements
since Beijing, endeavors to ensure that girls have universal access to “life
itself” have been stymied by a global failure to embrace consistent
non-discriminatory protection of girls beginning “at the earliest stages of
life” owing to pro-abortion activists at the United Nations.
Tragically,
the three most dangerous words in some parts of the world continue to be “It’s
a girl,” reflecting an anti-girl attitude that has resulted
in distorted birth ratios in China, India and Vietnam. Such distorted birth
rations are now appearing in Albania, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Kosovo, Liechtenstein, and Montenegro in
Eastern Europe and ethnic communities in the US.
The
organization All Girls Allowed, founded by 1989 Tiananmen Square democracy
movement student leader Chai Ling, is working to save the lives of girls in
China today. According to the organization, “Every day in China, the words
‘It's a girl!’ are received with sadness and disappointment, leading many
Chinese couples to engage in gendercide: the act of eliminating girls by
pre-natal sex selection, infanticide, abandonment and trafficking.” All Girls
Allowed seeks to restore joy to women who give birth to girls and provides a
monthly stipend that it ensures is used for a baby girl’s nutrition, clothing
and shelter in the first year of her life through its Baby Shower Gift program.
Laws banning sex
selection
Laws
against prenatal elimination based on sex are not always enforced despite the
fact that abortions for sex selection are illegal in China, Hong Kong, Singapore, South Korea, Taiwan, India,
the United Kingdom (which banned sex selection abortion for “social reasons”),
and Vietnam. Seven states—Arizona, Kansas, North Carolina, North
Dakota, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania and South Dakota—have laws prohibiting
sex-selection abortion. A vote in the US House of Representatives to ban sex
selection abortion in May 2012 received overwhelming support by a vote of 246
in favor to 168 opposed. Senate bill 48, the Prenatal Nondiscrimination Act of
2015, was introduced in January 2015 and is under consideration by the Senate Committee
on the Judiciary.
Legislation to ban sex selection
abortion is criticized by pro-abortion activists. A review of US state laws—Replacing
Myths with Facts: Sex-Selective Abortion Laws in the United States—produced by the International
Human Rights Clinic at the University of Chicago Law School questions the
motivation for such laws: “Restricting access to abortion is
the primary motivation for sex-selective abortion bans. All the bans have been
proposed and supported by people who oppose abortion generally.” The writers ought
to acquaint themselves with the Beijing Platform for Action, far from a
pro-life document, and its recommendation to governments in paragraph 283d:
“Enact and enforce legislation protecting girls from all forms of violence,
including female infanticide and prenatal sex selection.”
Recognition
of the need for enactment and rigorous enforcement of legislation to protect girls
from prenatal sex selection is clear. Opposition to pro-girl legislation
reveals blatant hypocrisy—pro-abortion organizations who profess they act on
behalf of women and girls but support the act of sex selection abortion whose
only purpose to end the life of a girl. Abortion is so sacrosanct to the
abortion movement that it is willing to sacrifice the lives of millions of girls
on the altar of “choice.”
An advance in technology to detect the sex of an unborn
child, as well as chromosomal abnormalities, is adding urgency to the need to
enact and implement laws against sex selection abortion. Reggie Littlejohn,
President of Women’s Rights
Without Frontiers, warned the Congressional-Executive Commission on China in
December about Noninvasive prenatal testing (NIPT) which uses the
mother’s blood to determine the sex of the child as early as in the seventh
week of pregnancy with results available with 48 hours. Littlejohn stated, “Where
brutal son preference meets non-invasive, early sex determination of a fetus,
inevitably baby girls will be selectively aborted.”
Hope for the
future
Countries
impacted by distorted birth ratios and son preference can look to South Korea
as a model of success for achieving transformational cultural change that
respects and protects girls from violence beginning in the earliest stages of
life. According to Eberstadt in “The Global War
Against Baby Girls,”
improvement in South Korea,
was influenced less by government policy
than by civil society: more specifically, by the spontaneous and largely
uncoordinated congealing of a mass movement for honoring, protecting, and
prizing daughters. In effect, this movement—drawing largely but by no means
exclusively on the faith-based community—sparked a national conversation of
conscience about the practice of female feticide. This conversation was
instrumental in stigmatizing the practice, not altogether unlike the way in
which nationwide conversations of conscience helped to stigmatize international
slave-trading in other countries in earlier times. The best hope today in the
global war against baby girls may be to carry this conversation of conscience
to other lands.
The
global pro-life movement will continue to speak out and defend the girl child.
We must work to oppose all acts of gender based violence, protect women’s and
girls’ lives, and seek consistent non-discriminatory life-affirming laws and policies.
The innate right to life of unborn baby girls comes first in the universal
quest for women’s and girls’ equality and empowerment, goals which can only
truly be achieved when applied consistently during all stages of life, no
exceptions.
Today,
on International Women’s Day, let us we remember the silent song and message of
the millions and millions of missing girls and women whose lives were ended
through sex selection abortion: “Girls just want to be born.” May we be renewed
and reenergized in the noble task to ensure that the lives of all girls are
protected in law and valued in life.
Marie Smith is the Director of the Parliamentary Network for Critical Issues (PNCI) and works with
legislators around the world to advance respect for life
in law and policy.