Gendercide through abortion is an international problem. While it’s commonly thought of as something almost exclusive to countries like China and India, the targeted abortion of babies because of their gender — usually girls — happens even in America. Yet pro-abortion advocates repeatedly insist that it’s not a problem, that it’s a scare tactic engineered by pro-lifers. But it’s all too real, as Australia is finding out now.
Researchers from La Trobe University have found that Australia has a problem of “missing girls.” Ordinarily, the ratio of girls to boys would be approximately 100 girls for every 105 boys — but in some areas, boys are being born at much higher rates — as high as 125 boys for every 100 girls. “We believe that some women may be terminating pregnancies after discovering they are expecting a girl and in other cases are travelling overseas to access non-medical sex selection services through assisted reproduction,” lead researcher Dr. Kristina Edvardsson said.
The bias against girls was higher if the mothers already had multiple children. Melbourne Dr. Gurdip Aurora, president of the Australia India Society of Victoria, said he had encountered a woman likely pursuing gendercide. “They wanted to have an ultrasound done and [then] decide whether they would have the child or not, if it happened to be a female,” he recounted. He refused to do it, but it seems she found someone else to commit the abortion instead. “I checked with her and she said unfortunately we were holidaying in India and there was a miscarriage. I was pretty sure in my mind that it was a female and they aborted it,” he said.
While it is illegal to choose a baby’s gender through IVF in Australia, aborting due to gender is not, and an abortionist can also feign ignorance for the woman’s reasons for seeking an abortion. So women still in the womb continue to have their most fundamental right stripped away from them: their right to life.
While the most egregious problem with sex selective abortion is robbing preborn girls of their very right to live, this practice causes other issues as well. In China and India, where gendercide is the most prevalent, there have been heartbreaking consequences. Men outnumber women by 70 million. Many men will never be able to marry, and the shortage of women has allowed human rights abuses — such as sex trafficking, prostitution, and crime — to flourish. Even more men are suffering from depression and loneliness. More women commit suicide in China than anywhere else in the world. And the babies that survive pregnancy are often abandoned to suffer in orphanages where they live in terrible conditions.
Abortion allows women to be seen as nothing but objects to be used when wanted and discarded when inconvenient. It causes destruction on numerous levels. And it will never stop until abortion is brought to an end.
