Apropos yesterday's post on the potential harmful side effects of a culture of abortion, Mark Steyn draws our attention to this opinion piece in the Christian Science Monitor:
Worldwide, there are already 100 million girls "missing" due to sex-selective abortion and female infanticide, according to the English medical journal The Lancet. Fifty million of these girls are thought to be from China. In many provinces, the sex ratio at birth is between 120 to 130 boys for every 100 girls; the natural number is about 104. What will happen in future decades when these boys grow up and look for wives?
Among other things, such a situation would exacerbate the growing problem of sexual trafficking, which will surely have its hardest effect on the most vulnerable in the developing world as China grows richer.
Another serious threat is to regional stability and, by extension, international security. As Valerie Hudson and Andrea den Boer recently wrote in their prize-winning work on demography and security, "Bare Branches," surplus male populations in a region often result in violence – through banditry, rioting, or militarization. The 6 to 5 male-female ratio in China means there are a lot of men who will not be able to start families. If history is any guide, they will either find less savory things to occupy their time, or find women through equally unsavory means.
The author of this piece fails to tell us where in The Lancet these numbers are reported. It might be this short article (registration may be required). Here are the important parts (notes eliminated):
Female infanticide of the past is refined and honed to a fine skill in this modern guise. It is ushered in earlier, more in urban areas and by the more educated, with the help of advanced technologies in the form of selective abortion of the female fetus whether in single or multiple pregnancies. A careful demographic analysis of actual and expected sex ratios shows that about 100 million girls are missing from the world—they are dead.
Concentration on respecting women's sexual and reproductive rights as well as their human rights can be the only answer to this problem. In 1986, the Federation of Obstetric and Gynaecological Societies of India passed a resolution against prenatal sex determination and medical termination of pregnancy because of the sex of the fetus. All members of the federation are asked to desist, dissociate, and discourage female feticide as it is a “crime against humanity”.
To eliminate prenatal sex selection and consequent termination of human life is a Herculean task. We can draw inspiration from Dr A P J Abdul Kalam, the President of India, who has said: “We have to demand from our institutions the impossible and the possible will emerge.”
The question here is why this is a problem for those who support abortion rights. Assuming there is no compulsion to obtain an abortion, is it not a violation of "reproductive rights" to tell a woman she cannot abort her child for the purpose of sex selection?
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