And recent study of Census data indicates that sex-selection is happening here in the United States. Immigrants who come to America with gender bias and want to abort their girls have the benefit of having the law on their side. While sex-selection is illegal in many countries including India and China, only a handful of states in the U.S. address the issue. Kansas is the latest to outlaw abortions on the basis of sex.
The United States needs federal law prohibiting sex-selective abortions. Last year, Congress had the opportunity to do just that by passing the Prenatal Nondiscrimination Act (PRENDA), but failed to do so because the political ramifications of putting limits on the progressive’s sacred cow, abortion. The Register reports:
Littlejohn scoffed at the federal political footballing of the issue. “Are they really for women’s rights?” she asked. “Or do they have a different agenda?”
Indeed. “Pro-choice feminists” seems more concerned with the mythical “reproductive right” than the lives of actual women. They deal with sex-selection in the U.S. by pretending it doesn’t exist and calling it “a problem rampant only in its rampant nonexistence.”
http://www.lifenews.com/2013/04/13/the-real-war-on-women-fueled-by-sex-selection-abortions/
When it comes to sex selection and gendercide, most people think of China, India, and other cultures that are known to prefer boys over girls. But, studies show that this unethical practice is happening right here in America.
The ripple effect is destroying girls, with human trafficking and violence on the rise.
Sex-selection abortion is defined as ‘an abortion undertaken for the purpose of eliminating a child of an undesired sex.’ Sex-selection can also be achieved through sperm sorting and embryo selection during the process of ‘assisted reproduction.’ Sperm sorting and embryo selection are expensive and not widely available, therefore, most sex-selection takes the form of abortion.
U.S. census data and national vital statistics show that indeed, sex-selection is a growing problem in America. Americans are employing sex-selection techniques in their reproductive decisions. Professor Abrevaya’s review of census and birth records showed that Americans have sex-selected thousands of baby girls.
Sex-selection abortion represents the most violent form of discrimination against women, victimizing two women at one time: mother and daughter. Many women are forced or coerced to have sex-selection abortions, and their daughters suffer the fatal consequences.
http://www.liveaction.org/gendercide/
The Planned Parenthood staffer suggests that the woman get on Medicaid in order to pay for an ultrasound to determine the gender of her baby, even though she plans to use the knowledge for an elective abortion. She also tells the woman to “just continue and try again” for the desired gender after aborting a girl, and adds, “Good luck, and I hope that you do get your boy.”
“The search-and-destroy targeting of baby girls through prenatal testing and abortion is a pandemic that is spreading across the globe,” notes Lila Rose, founder and president of Live Action. “Research proves that sex-selective abortion has now come to America. The abortion industry, led by Planned Parenthood, is a willing participant.”
Six studies in the past four years indicate that there are thousands of “missing girls” in the U.S., many from sex-selective abortion. The U.K., India, Australia, and other countries ban sex-selective abortion, but the U.S., with the exception of only three states, does not. On Wednesday, Congress will debate the Prenatal Non-Discrimination Act (PRENDA), which would ban sex-selective abortions nationally.
“Planned Parenthood and their ruthless abortion-first mentality is the real ‘war on women’,” says Rose. “Sex-selective abortion is gender discrimination with lethal consequences for little girls.”
http://www.whatwesave.com/1/previous/2.html
North Dakota is on the way to becoming the first state to ban abortions based on genetic “defects” like Down Syndrome. When diagnosed before birth, such genetic abnormalities prompt couples to have abortions 90 percent of the time. The measure would also ban abortion based on gender selection, an issue of increasing concern in the United States has people from nations like China and India migrate to the United States and bring their cultural preference for boys with them.
“HB 1305 would prohibit abortion if the abortion is on account of the sex of the unborn, or because the unborn child has been diagnosed with a genetic abnormality or a potential for a genetic abnormality,” it said. “”Throughout the world millions of the unborn are being aborted because they are not of the desired sex, and this phenomena is beginning to find its way to America. While all abortion is unacceptable, what we can do today is to make unlawful this atrocity–to abort because of the sex of the unborn is undesirable.”
The Lozier Institute poll, May 2012: 77% of respondents said that they would support a law banning abortion in cases where “the fact that the developing baby is a girl is the sole reason for seeking an abortion.”
LifeCanada poll, October 2011: Conducted by Environomics Research, showed that 92% of Canadians thought that sex-selection abortion should be illegal in Canada. Zogby poll, March 2006: Found that 86% of Americans believe that an abortion performed because of the sex of the developing child should be illegal.
“I see that you’re saying that you want to terminate if it’s a girl, so are you just wanting to continue the pregnancy in the meantime?” a counselor named “Rebecca” offers the woman, who is purportedly still in her first trimester and cannot be certain about the gender. “The abortion covers you up until 23 weeks,” explains Rebecca, “and usually at 5 months is usually (sic) when they detect, you know, whether or not it’s a boy or a girl.” Doctors agree that the later in term a doctor performs an abortion, the greater the risk of complications.
The Planned Parenthood staffer suggests that the woman get on Medicaid in order to pay for an ultrasound to determine the gender of her baby, even though she plans to use the knowledge for an elective abortion. She also tells the woman to “just continue and try again” for the desired gender after aborting a girl, and adds, “Good luck, and I hope that you do get your boy.”
Six studies in the past four years indicate that there are thousands of “missing girls” in the U.S., many from sex-selective abortion.
http://liveaction.org/blog/sex-selective-abortion-thrives-in-america-courtesy-planned-parenthood/
If “after-birth abortion” is “permissible,” where does it stop? Given the brutal realities of what is taking place in China and India and elsewhere, what these ethicists are supporting is “gendercide.” A legal, “permitted” assault on female babies.
http://www.lifenews.com/2012/03/01/after-birth-abortions-and-infanticide-where-does-it-end/
Slowly but surely one of the most outrageous violations of human rights is beginning to seep into public consciousness: the massive loss of female babies due to sex-selection abortion made possible by ultrasounds. We wrote about this most recently earlier this month—“The Persistence of Sex-Selective Abortion and the Silence of Pro-Abortion Feminists”.
The past week two stunning insightful reviews appeared based on the same source as were my comments: The book, “Unnatural Selection: Choosing Boys Over Girls, and the Consequences of a World Full of Men,” by journalist Mara Hvistendahl. I will provide the highlights of each along with the links.
“160 Million and Counting,” written by Ross Douthat, appeared in the New York Times (www.nytimes.com/2011/06/27/opinion/27douthat.html?_r=1).
In many ways the most important insight was contained in the first two paragraphs.
Twenty years ago the economist Amartya Sen published an essay in The New York Review of Books “with a bombshell title: ‘More Than 100 Million Women Are Missing.’” Not a word about abortion; the explanation for “wildly off-kilter sex ratios” in the developing world was attributed to “neglect” of women Douthat writes.
Two decades later the number of missing women is up to more than 160 million, and as the title of the new book suggest, “Hvistendahl argues that most of the missing females weren’t victims of neglect,” Douthat writes, “They were selected out of existence, by ultrasound technology and second-trimester abortion.”
Typically—and understandably—virtually the entire blame for the spread of sex-selective abortions is laid at the feet of deeply patriarchal cultures empowered by technology to “weed out” females. And while certainly part of the explanation, a major point of Hvistendahl’s book is that in many communities, “’women use their increased autonomy to select for sons,’ because male offspring bring higher social status,” according to Douthat. This mindset has begun, in countries like India, “in the urban, well-educated stratum of society” before it filters down to those who occupy a lower rung on the income ladder.
One additional observation from Douthat: “Western governments and philanthropic institutions have their fingerprints all over the story of the world’s missing women.” He writes, “For many of these antipopulation campaigners, sex selection was a feature rather than a bug, since a society with fewer girls was guaranteed to reproduce itself at lower rates.” This slaughter is not entirely or perhaps even largely, indigenous: it was aided and abetted by “progressives” from the West.
Jonathan Last, a senior writer for the Weekly Standard, reviewed the book for the Wall Street Journal.
He begins with the basic, basics—the “biologically ironclad” ratio in nature: 105 boys are born for every 100 girls.
“Yet today in India there are 112 boys born for every 100 girls,” he writes. “In China, the number is 121—though plenty of Chinese towns are over the 150 mark. China’s and India’s populations are mammoth enough that their outlying sex ratios have skewed the global average to a biologically impossible 107. But the imbalance is not only in Asia. Azerbaijan stands at 115, Georgia at 118 and Armenia at 120.”
The lethal logic is inescapable, if the objective is to have sons. The ratios are pretty unremarkable for the first child but by the time we get to third births there are 185 males for every 100 girls and for fourth-born children of parents desperate for a son a “mind-boggling 209” males.
The outcomes are equally inexorable—a spike in violence among populations seething with unattached men; a bidding war for women; men in wealthier countries “poach women from poorer ones,” to name just three. But, “as Columbia economics professor Lena Edlund observes: ‘The greatest danger associated with prenatal sex determination is the propagation of a female underclass,’ that a small but still significant group of the world’s women will end up being stolen or sold from their homes and forced into prostitution or marriage.”
Both Douthat and Last make clear that Hvistendahl hardly has a pro-life agenda. Rather than stopping (because of its intrinsic evil) the purposive killing of 163 million—and growing daily—women from sex-selective abortions, something must be done or it could lead, Hvistendahl writes, to “feminists’ worst nightmare: a ban on all abortions.”
Last writes, “Even though 163 million girls have been denied life solely because of their gender, she can’t help seeing the problem through the lens of an American political issue.” (She is “particularly worried,” Last observes, “that the ‘right wing’ or the ‘Christian right’—as she labels those whose politics differ from her own—will use sex-selective abortion as part of a wider war on abortion itself.”)
So the trick for Ms. Hvistendahl is to come up with “some suggestions as to how such ‘abuse’ might be curbed without infringing on a woman’s right to have an abortion,” Last writes,
“In attempting to serve these two diametrically opposed ideas, she proposes banning the common practice of revealing the sex of a baby to parents during ultrasound testing. And not just ban it, but have rigorous government enforcement, which would include nationwide sting operations designed to send doctors and ultrasound techs and nurses who reveal the sex of babies to jail. Beyond the police surveillance of obstetrics facilities, doctors would be required to ‘investigate women carrying female fetuses more thoroughly’ when they request abortions, in order to ensure that their motives are not illegal.
“Such a regime borders on the absurd. It is neither feasible nor tolerable—nor efficacious: Sex determination has been against the law in both China and India for years, to no effect. I suspect that Ms. Hvistendahl’s counter-argument would be that China and India do not enforce their laws rigorously enough.”
Last’s conclusion is so tightly reasoned I have to quote it in its entirety.
“Despite the author’s intentions, ‘Unnatural Selection’ might be one of the most consequential books ever written in the campaign against abortion. It is aimed, like a heat-seeking missile, against the entire intellectual framework of ‘choice.’ For if ‘choice’ is the moral imperative guiding abortion, then there is no way to take a stand against ‘gendercide.’ Aborting a baby because she is a girl is no different from aborting a baby because she has Down syndrome or because the mother’s “mental health” requires it. Choice is choice. One Indian abortionist tells Ms. Hvistendahl: “I have patients who come and say ‘I want to abort because if this baby is born it will be a Gemini, but I want a Libra.’ “
“This is where choice leads. This is where choice has already led. Ms. Hvistendahl may wish the matter otherwise, but there are only two alternatives: Restrict abortion or accept the slaughter of millions of baby girls and the calamities that are likely to come with it.”
http://www.lifenews.com/2011/06/29/girls-in-india-sex-selection-aborted-out-of-existence/
Previously, abortion advocates not only opposed the bill in great hysteria but also denied the very existence of sex selection abortions. Nancy Northup, President of the Center for Reproductive Rights, called it a “trumped up bill for a trumped up problem.” Meanwhile at the pro-abortion blog Jezebel, a writer called sex selection abortions “a problem rampant only in its rampant nonexistence.”
http://www.lifenews.com/2012/05/31/president-obama-opposes-ban-on-sex-selection-abortions/
Petition: Protect Our Girls Coalition (calling for an immediate ban on the horrific practice of sex-selection abortion)
http://protectourgirls.com/petition/
It’s a Girl Documentary Film
In India, China and many other parts of the world today, girls are killed, aborted and abandoned simply because they are girls. The United Nations estimates as many as 200 million girls(1) are missing in the world today because of this so-called “gendercide”.
Girls who survive infancy are often subject to neglect, and many grow up to face extreme violence and even death at the hands of their own husbands or other family members.
The war against girls is rooted in centuries-old tradition and sustained by deeply ingrained cultural dynamics which, in combination with government policies, accelerate the elimination of girls.
Shot on location in India and China, It’s a Girl reveals the issue. It asks why this is happening, and why so little is being done to save girls and women.
The film tells the stories of abandoned and trafficked girls, of women who suffer extreme dowry-related violence, of brave mothers fighting to save their daughters’ lives, and of other mothers who would kill for a son. Global experts and grassroots activists put the stories in context and advocate different paths towards change, while collectively lamenting the lack of any truly effective action against this injustice.
http://www.itsagirlmovie.com/synopsis#sthash.yTILVrZ3.dpuf
When thousands of Indians took to the streets to protest the inability of the establishment to protect women, they demanded not just a change in the law but in people’s attitudes. But the watershed moment that many Indians hoped for doesn’t seem to have arrived. And that may be because most Indians don’t even recognise the extent of the problem in their own country.
Let’s start with a figure: 60 million. That is nearly the entire population of the United Kingdom. That is also the approximate number of women “missing” in India. They have either been aborted before birth, killed once born, died of neglect because they were girls, or perhaps murdered by their husband’s family for not paying enough dowry at marriage.
That number isn’t a wild exaggeration or a figure thoughtlessly plucked out of the air, but a matter of demographics. As far back as 1991, the economist Amartya Sen pointed out that Asia was missing 100 million womenbecause of sex-selection and the poor attention paid to women. In 2005, it was estimated at 50 million Indian women in the New York Times. But this isn’t a new problem.
In 1991, the Indian census showed an unprecedented drop of women in the sex-ratio. After running tests to check whether women had been under-counted, they found that a massive explosion in sex-selection during the 80s had led to a sharp drop in the number of girls being born. A report by Action Aid in 2009 (“Disappearing Daughters” [PDF]) found that in some villages in the state of Punjab, there were as few as 300 girls for every 1,000 boys.
Overall, India had 37.25 million fewer women than men according to the 2011 Census. To match the sexes equally and then increase the number of women to match the natural sex-ratio would require around 60 to 70 million women. That is the number of women missing. This phenomenon cannot be called anything less than genocide.
So why isn’t there more recognition of this mass tragedy? In my recently released e-book India Dishonoured: Behind a Nation’s War on Women, I show that many Indians don’t want to recognise the problem because it has become deeply ingrained in the culture.
http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2013/07/201372814110570679.html
See Also:
http://www.lifenews.com/2013/02/07/planned-parenthoods-okay-with-sex-selection-abortions-in-the-u-s/
Sex Selection in America: Part 1 – Undercover in Texas
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U2H3ZDnBtuw
Sex Selection in America: Part 2 – Undercover in NYC
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Fz2KLSxDzc
Sex Selection in America: Part 3 – Undercover in Arizona
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1q6_Nx3f4EU
Sex Selection in America: Part 4 – Undercover in Hawaii
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UKLllKQ-g74
Sex Selection in America: Part 5 – Undercover in North Carolina
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z0pdhjl2XDY
