Girls Just Want to Be Born

Public Discourse 8 March 2016
Family First Comment: Speaking of International Women’s Day, here’s the REAL issue…….

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.
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