Certain worldviews lead to contradictions so absurd you’d laugh — if the cost weren’t measured in lives. There’s one contradiction I find particularly shocking.
Long-time listeners to BreakPoint will know that my colleagues and I consider the sanctity of life a global issue. Not only is abortion an injustice no matter where it takes place, but the social disasters wrought by killing millions of babies in the womb are hard to imagine. Nowhere is this truer than in China, where the government’s infamous one-child policy has snuffed out a generation of girls and left a gender imbalance probably without precedent in human history.
Chillingly, on this year’s 34th anniversary of the policy’s enactment, 34 million Chinese boys face the fact that they’ll never find wives, because those women were simply never born.
The reason the policy has had such a disproportionate impact on the sexes there is simple: in China, as in most traditional Asian cultures, male children are more highly prized than females. Thus, if the government says you can only have one child, most Chinese parents prefer a boy, who will carry on their family name and legacy.
And tens of millions of parents have apparently decided, when greeted by a sonogram image of a female child, that they’d rather abort and try again. As several commentators have observed, “it’s a girl” might be the most deadly words in the world right now. The trend has spawned a distressing new term: “gendercide.”
But gendercide isn’t limited to the far side of the Pacific.
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Evidence has long shown that Asian immigrants to the U.S. retain their cultural bias for boys. The preference becomes especially pronounced in third pregnancies. Among Asian mothers who already have at least two girls, only 100 more girls are born for every 151 boys. Considering the natural rate of male to female births is nearly equal, it’s safe to say something is going on here.
But happily in the U.S., we have a natural ally: feminists. Surely these defenders of the rights and equality of women are leading the charge against aborting girls in utero for the crime of not being boys. If there’s any clear case of sex discrimination, this is it—right?
Well, you’d think so. But as Rachel Lu writes at “The Federalist,” not only have most feminists ignored the problem of gendercide—they’re arguing it doesn’t exist.
When one San Francisco supervisor recently proposed a “ban on bans” of sex-selective abortions, he claimed such abortions just don’t happen in the U. S., and anyone who says they do is engaging in racial stereotypes. Writers at the Huffington Post, Slate, Mother Jones and Reason joined the chorus. They cite a new University of Chicago study that they say debunks older stats on sex-selective abortions. But as Lu points out, the study actually confirms the prevalence of such abortions. Its authors apparently didn’t want this fact widely known, since their admission is “buried” on page 16 amid what Lu calls “graphs and meanderings about methodology.”
The fact that so many feminist writers are celebrating the study without bothering to actually read it makes me think they care more about protecting abortion than they do about protecting future generations of women.
Instead of fighting tooth and nail against this kind of discrimination, feminists are on the front lines defending or denying it. They’re in effect sowing the seeds of their own destruction—or more accurately the destruction of society’s most vulnerable women.
I’m reminded of G. K. Chesterton’s description of the modern secularist’s conundrum. He likened it to the eastern image of “a serpent eating its own tail, a degraded animal who destroys even himself.”
I can hardly think of a better symbol of feminists refusing to confront gendercide. But when a woman’s “right to choose” becomes a right to destroy her own sex, you start to wonder: is abortion as empowering to women as we’re told?
Reprinted with permission from Break Point