By Dave Andrusko

Editor's note. If you'd like, follow me on www.twitter.com/daveha.

Many is the time I've wondered out loud--and in complete sincerity--how pro-abortion feminists can not be up in arms over sex-selection abortions and infanticide when the victims are almost always females. This would seem to be a no-brainer, even for the most militant.

I happened across a recent Washington Post review of a new book, "Half the Sky: Turning Oppression Into Opportunity for Women Worldwide." The reviewer is Prof. Martha Nussbaum, who is famous for many things, but for our purposes as a signer of the bogus "Historian's Brief" sent to the Supreme Court as a "friend of the court brief" in the 1989 Webster v. Reproductive Health Services abortion case.

Although the 281 professional historians, including Nussbaum, did acknowledge that "physicians were the principal nineteenth-century proponents of laws to restrict abortion," they firmly denied the transparently obvious--that concern for the unborn was one of the physicians' reasons! Among other faulty arguments, the brief also asserted that the life of the unborn child "became a central issue in American culture only in the late twentieth century."

I mention that to make clear that Nussbaum's pro-abortion credentials are in order.

Her Post review critiques many areas far out of my expertise, including a judgment of which regions of the globe are most oppressive to women--and why. Nussbaum has lots of good things to say about authors, the husband-and-wife team of Nicholas D. Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn, but her review is hardly uncritical.

From our single-issue perspective the most important criticism is found in the following two paragraphs.

"The gravest problem, one that the authors mention but never treat in detail, is the basic denial to girls of life itself, whether through infanticide, discriminatory nutrition and health care in childhood, or the increasingly common practice of sex-selective abortion. Here the nations of East Asia leap into prominence. The natural ratio of girls to boys at birth is typically taken to be 95 to 100. In Singapore and Taiwan, the figure is 92 girls to 100 boys, in South Korea 88, in China only 86.

"These figures reflect only sex-selective abortion, and not deaths after birth from infanticide or differential nutrition and medical care. The overall sex ratio, which does include these deaths, is even more striking: China and South Korea have two of the most unbalanced sex ratios in the world."

Devastating numbers like this do make it into the popular press on occasion, but often in the context (explicit or implicit) of "well, that's the way it is in those cultures." Here Nussbaum cuts right to the chase. There are many horrific discriminatory practices women face around the world, none of which are unimportant, but the gravest is "the basic denial to girls of life itself."