It’s a Girl

by Michael Stokes Paulsen
October 24, 2011

The Supreme Court’s abortion jurisprudence appears to protect a right to abortion even for reasons of sex selection. Yet this gruesome reality might provide an opening for a frontal assault on the premises of Roe v. Wade.

Millions of women obtain abortions because they do not want baby girls.

It’s shocking, but incontrovertible. Two decades ago, Harvard economist Amartya Sen, in an arrestingly titled article, documented the statistical reality that “More Than 100 Million Women Are Missing.” In a recently published book, Unnatural Selection, journalist Mara Hvistendahl convincingly demonstrates that the overwhelming reason for the increasingly large demographic disparity in the male-female birth ratio is sex-selection abortion. Hvistendahl estimates the number of missing or dead now to be 160 million and counting. Women have abortions because (among other reasons) they are able to learn the sex of their unborn baby and kill her if she’s a girl.

The phenomenon is most pronounced in certain Asian populations where the birth of girls is especially discouraged, but is not limited to Asia. Hvistendahl shows that sex-selection is not culturally or uniquely Asian. Male-child preference exists everywhere. Sex-selection abortion rises as birth rates fall, as wealth increases (especially in developing nations), and as technology for identifying a child’s gender in utero becomes more reliable and more available. the rest image by Kelly Bailey