Dear Colleague:

Sex-selective abortion is threatening the stability of major Asian
nations.  In America, our elected representatives should not only combat
this scourge abroad, they should ensure it doesn't become common here.

Steven W. Mosher
President

PRI Weekly Briefing
19 January 2007
Vol. 9, No. 3


Feminism's Triumph: The Extermination of Women
By Joseph A. D'Agostino


In the last two years, international organizations and Asian nations have
stepped up their efforts to eliminate sex-selective abortions, which have
created a massive dearth of girls in many nations over the past 20 years.
With the new year, some new statistics have been released.  The result of
these efforts?  The sex imbalance continues to worsen, not improve, thanks
to the ever-increasing spread of cheap abortion and ultrasound technology
into more and more areas of China, India, and other countries.

One expert who spoke at the United Nations estimates that up to 200
million women and girls are missing worldwide because of sex-selective
abortion and female infanticide.  Some experts put the figure as low as 60
million.  All agree it gets bigger every day.

With rapidly growing Asian and Muslim immigrant communities in the United
States, will a sex ratio imbalance soon emerge here, unless sex-selective
abortion is outlawed?  Last year, a Zogby/USA Today poll found that 86% of
Americans oppose sex-selective abortions.  Sex imbalances have already
been documented among Canada's Asian immigrant communities.

Feminists like to blame this rapidly-worsening situation on "patriarchy,"
but that has been around for thousands of years and is less powerful today
than ever before.  What is new, is the access to abortion in so many
places.  And this has long been a paramount goal of feminists: To grant
the "right to control her own body" to each woman on Earth via
unrestricted abortion.  That, combined with falling prices for the
ultrasound machines that can reveal an unborn child's sex, has produced
the disastrous situation that the Asian world is in now.

And just how, exactly, are men on the whole supposed to benefit from being
unable to find wives?  By 2020, 30 million Chinese men of marriageable age
are expected to be in that situation because of 30 million "missing" young
women.  Many historians warn that a large number of unmarried men in a
society is a recipe for social unrest and war.  The kidnapping of women
for forced marriage and prostitution is already increasing exponentially
in Asia.  This is a disaster for both sexes and society as a whole.

The great experiment of feminism, just 40 years or so old as a social
force, has produced this wonder: The ever-growing elimination of more and
more girls worldwide.  And so far, nothing can stop it.  Indeed, from the
feminist perspective, how or why should it be stopped?  If women have a
right to an abortion, why can they not exercise it on the basis of sex
selection?  Is the abortion her choice, or the government's?

Also, beyond mere personal preference, many women and their husbands have
rational reasons for preferring sons over daughters.  For example, most
Chinese still live on farms barely above subsistence level.  A son is
better able to perform the hard work that farm life demands than a
daughter.  Sons and sons' wives traditionally care for the sons' parents,
while daughters join their husbands' families.

When you consider that China's Communist government forcibly limits
Chinese families to one or two children, it's no surprise that Chinese
couples employ abortion to ensure having a son while staying under the
limit.  They murder their own children to comply with the law while
ensuring their own survival in old age.  Some Indian states, too, employ
coercive practices to limit family size to two.  Western feminists
supported population control from the very beginning, believing that fewer
children would liberate women from the "oppression" of motherhood.  And
tax, spending, and economic pressures all over the developed world have
made child-raising very expensive.

Outlawing sex-selective abortion has not made any difference in China and
India.  There is no way to enforce such a ban when abortion laws are so
permissive.  The only solution, of course, is a return to a culture that
values all human life, and legal protection for unborn children.  Growing
sex ratio imbalances provide strong evidence for the practical arguments
against abortion, separate from moral ones.  Some large societies could
simply fall apart if abortion is not restrained.

Let's look at some of the statistics for the sex imbalances that the brave
new world of abortion has wreaked in just two decades.  According to China
Daily, 118 Chinese boys were born for every 100 Chinese girls last year,
up from 110 just five years earlier.  The maximum natural imbalance is 107
boys per 100 girls.  The 118-100 Chinese split is just for births and
doesn't account for the far greater number of girls than boys who are
allowed to starve to death as children, or who are sent off to ill-managed
government orphanages (95% of Chinese orphans are girls).  In prosperous
Guangdong province in southern China, the ratio has reached 130 boys per
100 girls, proving that financial hardship is not the primary cause of
this phenomenon.  UNICEF estimates that there are only 832 girls per 1,000
boys in China, making the world's largest country also its most
sex-imbalanced.

India, the world's second-largest nation, has the second-worst sex ratio,
with 927 girls for every 1,000 boys.  Again, poverty is not the primary
root cause: In the Indian state with the highest per capita income,
Punjab, the imbalance is 793 girls for every 1,000 boys.  Fifteen years
ago, when India was poorer and abortion and ultrasound less affordable, it
was 874 per 1,000 in Punjab.  Sex imbalances in China and India really
matter, because together, these two countries have over one-third of the
Earth's population.  UNICEF, no opponent of abortion in general, says
7,000 fewer girls are now born in India each day than nature would
dictate, and ten million have been killed during pregnancy or just after
in the past 20 years.

Taiwan has 110 boys born for every 100 girls, and South Korea has 108.

The Toronto Globe & Mail has noticed a slight tendency toward
sex-selection among South Asian immigrant communities.  Focusing on the
areas in which many of these immigrants have chosen to settle, the
newspaper reported, "Figures from the 2001 census supplied by Statistics
Canada suggest a slight skew in the usual gender ratio among people with
South Asian backgrounds. . . . According to the 2001 census data, the
proportion of girls under 15 in the South Asian communities of Mississauga
and Brampton is two percentage points below the ratio for the rest of the
population in those municipalities."

That's not nearly as bad as in India, where the difference is 6%, or
China, where it is 12%.  Yet, as these communities grow rapidly and become
less and less assimilated with their host country--which the Globe & Mail
says is the trend--will sex-selective abortion increase?

Sex imbalances are worsening in Middle Eastern and African countries as
well, with abortion and ultrasound gradually penetrating traditional
cultures there.  Can Europe, with its expanding immigrant communities and
shrinking native populations, be immune?

Reliable data on the United States' immigrant communities is hard to come
by.  Certainly, the United States as a whole has no unnatural imbalance in
her boy-girl ratio.

Should we wait for this problem to develop into a substantial one here
before taking action?  As Americans, we should ensure that this immoral
and socially destructive habit does not become entrenched here as our
Chinese and other immigrant communities continue their rapid growth.
China and India outlawed sex-selective abortion years ago, to no effect,
and their societies are headed over a cliff.  Here in the United States,
with our more effective regulatory structure, we should outlaw this
practice and seek to eliminate it elsewhere around the world before this
crisis gets any worse.

The worsening sex ratio of the world in general, and Asia in particular,
is proof that abortion-on-demand isn't practical.


Joseph A. D'Agostino is Vice President for Communications at the
Population Research Institute.

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