The Bitter Irony of Female Feticide -- Part Two of Two

It’s a fact of human nature that some of the great atrocities of our times never make it onto many people’s radar screens. That is surely the case with sex-selection abortions—“female feticide”-- which compounds the horror of abortion by adding the dimension of profiling the unborn to snare female babies.

A column that appeared in yesterday’s St. Louis Post Dispatch—“The Bitter Irony of Sex-Selective Abortion”—does a superb job of providing a quick overview of this grotesque denial of human equality and pointing out (in Colleen Carroll Campbell’s words) the “silence of most American feminist leaders.”

Campbell cites a study in the British publication The Lancet that we’ve also discussed previously. (See www.nrlc.org/news_and_Views/April08/nv042908.html] It details an already ghastly situation in India which is even worse in the nation’s urban areas.

Some half-million baby girls are aborted there each year, according to The Lancet. Consequently, the male/female ratio is terribly skewed (927 girls for every 1.000 boys), largely because of the advent of inexpensive ultrasounds.
Campbell quotes investigative journalist Gita Aravamudan who argues in her 2007 book, "Female infanticide is akin to serial killing. But female feticide is more like a holocaust. A whole gender is getting exterminated." This massive affront is not confined to India.

“The most egregious example is China,” Campbell writes, “where a 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.” But, course, sex-selective abortion is neither illegal nor unheard of in the United States.

“Lax abortion laws and technological access make it easier than ever for parents to target and delete unwanted daughters or sons before birth,” Campbell writes. Then something I had never heard before—that “female feticide may be disturbingly common in some American communities.”

She cites an analysis of 2000 Census data published recently in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. “Columbia University economists Douglas Almond and Lena Edlund examined the sex ratio of births among U.S.-born children of Chinese, Korean and Asian-Indian parents,” she writes. “They found ‘evidence of sex selection,’ most likely at the prenatal stage."

Campbell hastens to add, “The study does not mean that most Asian-Americans practice sex selection, of course,” but notes, “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.”

She concludes with something that we do already know: the silence of most American feminist leaders “in the face of this modern atrocity.” Campbell calls it the “bitterest ironies of our post-feminist age.”

Refusing to “brook any limits on abortion rights,” the “abortion license touted as the key to liberating future generations of women [has] become the preferred means of eradicating them.”

You can read Campbell’s column at www.stltoday.com/stltoday/news/columnists.nsf/colleencarrollcampbell/story/0ED6D7000958FCB686257457007B511B?OpenDocument.

Please send your comments to daveandrusko@hotmail.com.

Part One