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Since the late 1970s, 163 million female babies have been aborted by parents who preferred a boy.
Mara Hvistendahl, a noted journalist, influential writer and a feminist, has become so alarmed by the global trend of choosing boys over girls---sex-selective abortion, that she has written new book titled, "Unnatural Selection".
She is not pro-life, nor is she writing from a moral or even political point of view and mocks the biblical teaching on Creationism as the "West's predominant creation myth."
Yet her book is significant to the pro-life movement. That's why I reviewed it. And why I am sharing some thoughts from the book. Although unintended, her book is a gift to the pro-life cause.
She documents that in nature, 105 boys are born for every 100 girls. This ratio is universal in all cultures and economic levels, except...
The exception is why she wrote the book.
The case she makes is that artificially created gender imbalance leads to cultural violence. And in doing so, inadvertently affirms the pro-life position.
She documents that in India today, there are 112 boys born for every 100 girls. In China the number is 121, with some Chinese towns over 150 to 100.
This growing imbalance is not unique to Asia. Azerbaijan has 115, Georgia 118, and Armenia is 120.
Here's how Planned Parenthood and other organizations like them are creating a cultural world crises of violence and the process that got us here. And a profile of the human and moral conflict that accompanies abortion.
In the 1970s, amniocentesis, which reveals the sex of a baby in utero, became available in developing countries. Although meant for good, by the 1980s it was known simply as the "sex test" in India and other countries where parents often prefer sons to daughters.
Then came ultrasound.
A sign in an Indian clinic says it all, "Better 500 rupees now, than 5000 later." A reference to the cost of a girl's dowry.
In her negative bias toward Western culture, she documents how the Ford Foundation, United Nations and Planned Parenthood have advanced sex selective abortion as a means of population growth control.
For example, she quotes Malcom Potts, the medical director for International Planned Parenthood Federation in 1976 saying that when it comes to developing nations, abortion was better than birth control. He wrote, "Early abortion is safe, effortless, cheap and potentially the easiest method to administer."
She documents Planned Parenthood's close relationship to China's family planning and reminds readers that as early as 1969, the Population Councils' Sheldon Segal was publicly calling for more abortions as a means of combating the "Population Bomb," the title of a book written by Paul Ehrlich which caused hysteria much like Al Gore and his global warming hysteria of more recent times.
While Hvistendahl is solidly pro-abortion, she argues that gender imbalances are a sign of bad things to come.
She writes, "Historically, societies in which men substantially outnumber women are not nice places to live---often unstable, sometimes violent," noting high sex ratios in fourth century BC Athens, China's Taiping Rebellion in the 1800s, and even America's early western frontier.
She documents that there is compelling evidence of a link between high sex ratios and violence. According to her research, historically, high sex ratios mean a society is going to have "surplus men" with no hope of marrying due to a lack of women. "In Chinese provinces where sex ratios have spiked, a crime wave has followed," she says.
She found that in India today the best predictor of violence and crime for any given area is not income, but sex ratio. Another problem for some on the far left.
There's much more---unnatural sex ratios lead to abuse of women, more prostitution, etc. However, here's my point: Here's why I wrote this today.
While she believes something must be done about the advancing sex ratio imbalance, she is deeply conflicted in her own beliefs.
She worries out loud as she writes that this situation "could lead to a feminist's worst nightmare: a ban on all abortions."
The worst nightmare, then, is not the killing of 163 million baby girls, but the possible loss of the opportunity to do so.
Moral conflict.
She writes, "After decades of fighting for a woman's right to choose the outcome of her own pregnancy, it is difficult to turn around and point out that women are abusing that right."
She particularly worries about the "Right Wing" or "Christian Right" using sex-selective abortion as part of a wider war on abortion itself.
This book may well be one of the most consequential books written about the atrocities of abortion. And its coming from one of their own.
If "choice" is the moral imperative guiding abortion, and they say it is, then there is no way they can take a position against sex-selective abortion. Aborting a baby because she is a girl is, in their frame of reference, no different than aborting a baby as birth control, Down Syndrome or any number of other reasons often used to justify taking a child's life.
Choice is Choice.
And this is where violating God's principles and truth will always take an individual, a nation or a world.
Confusion and conflict.
Be Vigilant. Be Discerning. Be Prayerful. Be Active. Be Blessed.
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