By Dave Andrusko

Last week we talked a lot about NRLC 2010, the highly successful three-day National Right to Life convention attended by upwards of 1,000 pro-life activists. Yesterday, I posted a link to the place online where you can go to order CDs of the workshops, general sessions, Prayer Breakfast, and closing Banquet (www.nrlc.org/convention/NRLC2010CDOrderForm.pdf).

Steven W. Mosher Photo credit: Mary Anne Buchanan

Today I want to pick up with the superb general session that opened our convention June 26. The title is "Sex-Selective Abortion: Causes, Consequences and Solutions" and the presenter was our old friend, Steven W. Mosher, President, Population Research Institute.

His address discussed a problem that too few North Americans know has already extended its ugly tentacles to our continent.

Mr. Mosher talked, of course, about China and its merciless one-child policy and the plague of abortions that target unborn baby girls. But he began with India, which he said, "has a de facto two-child policy. A national survey published in The Lancet revealed that as many as half a million female fetuses are aborted there each year because of their gender."

Mosher referred to a recent United Nations Population Fund report that "says at least 60 million girls are 'missing' throughout Asia because of sex-selective abortion, infanticide and neglect." China's brutally enforced "one-child policy has produced a national ratio of 117 boys born for every 100 girls, with some provinces posting ratios of more than 130 boys per 100 girls," Mosher said. He talked of visiting elementary schools in rural China "where, out of a total of 30 students, 20 or so are boys. On a national level, demographers predict that there will be 30 million more Chinese men than women of marriageable age by 2020."

In discussing the socioeconomic causes of sex-selective abortion, Mosher pointed out at the same time "Asian peoples have seen a dramatic rise in their standards of living and access to medical care in recent decades," this "increased prosperity and new medical technologies [such as ultrasounds] have also enabled them to act on their longstanding preference for male children by undergoing prenatal sex determination and selective abortion."

The prejudice against girls in Asia "is not limited to men, but is, ironically enough, found throughout the population," Mosher sadly added. "If you ask Indian schoolchildren whether they prefer a brother or a sister as a sibling, the vast majority will say they would prefer to have a brother. Girls, they will say, cost more to their parents."

Sex-selective abortion (also known as "female feticide") is "illegal under Indian and Chinese law," Mosher told the audience. "India has in fact gone even further, requiring all ultrasound machines to be registered with the authorities." But--a huge caveat--"These laws are not rigorously enforced and, as a result, have scarcely curbed the practice."

And these practices are no longer limited to Asia, Mosher said. "New evidence shows that it is now being practiced by immigrant communities in the U.S., Canada, and even Europe." He hastened to add, "Such numbers do not mean that most Asians living abroad practice sex selection, of course. What the numbers do suggest is that this ultimate form of misogyny can happen in any culture that fails to defend the intrinsic dignity of every human life."

Mosher ended his speech by talking about the widespread opposition, as measured by public opinion polls, to sex-selection abortion in this country (86% in a 2006 Zogby/USA Today poll, for example). Recently Oklahoma passed a law banning abortion "solely on account of the sex of the unborn child," the first such law, he said, since 1989.

Mosher believes that as the pro-abortion movement "flounder[s] about trying to defend the indefensible, we will be winning converts to the pro-life cause--and bringing closer the day when all American lives shall be protected, from conception to natural death."

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