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.

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. He warns:

The practice has become so ruthlessly routine in many contemporary societies that it has impacted their very population structures, warping the balance between male and female births, and consequently skewing the sex ratios for the rising generation toward a biologically unnatural excess of males. This still-growing international predilection for sex-selective abortion is by now evident in the demographic contours of dozens of countries around the globe —and it is sufficiently severe that it has come to alter the overall sex ratio at birth of the entire planet, resulting in millions upon millions of new “missing baby girls” each year. In terms of its sheer toll in human numbers, sex-selective abortion has assumed a scale tantamount to a global war against baby girls.

For many women and girls in China who survived the prenatal “search and destroy” missions of the global war against baby girls, the state of their lives is dismal. China has one of the highest female suicide rates in the world, as 590 women a day ended their own lives in 2012, according to the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention.

Read More