Sunday, June 19, 2011

Worldwide Abortion: The War on Girls

In her new book "Unnatural Selection," Science writer Mara Hvistendahl examines how the trend toward choosing boys over girls through sex-selective abortions has spread through the developing world, particularly in Asia.
Since the late 1970s, 163 million female babies have been aborted by parents seeking sons.
UPDATE 6/21/11: Private U.S. firms advertise sex-selective services



-- From "Western Governments Are Blamed for Asia's Shortage of Women" by Ujala Sehgal, The Atlantic 6/18/11

. . . what distinguishes Hvistendahl's book from other similar reports is that, as the Guardian notes in a profile today, she "lays the blame squarely on western governments and businesses that have exported technology and pro-abortion practices without considering the consequences," unlike other accounts, that solely basing sex selection on cultural practices.

Amniocentesis and ultrasound scans have had largely positive applications in the west, where they have been used to detect fetal abnormalities. But exported to Asia and eastern Europe they have been intricately linked to an explosion of sex selection and a mushrooming of female abortions. Hvistendahl claims western governments actively promoted abortion and sex selection in the developing world, encouraging the liberalization of abortion laws and subsidizing sales of ultrasounds as a form of population control.

Moreover, she also blames the UNFPA, the UN's main population agency, for refusing to own up to its role in funding sex-selection.

To read the entire article above, CLICK HERE.

From "The War Against Girls" by Jonathan V. Last, senior writer at the Weekly Standard (posted at Wall Street Journal) 6/18/11

In nature, 105 boys are born for every 100 girls. This ratio is biologically ironclad. Between 104 and 106 is the normal range, and that's as far as the natural window goes. Any other number is the result of unnatural events.

Yet today in India there are 112 boys born for every 100 girls. In China, the number is 121—though plenty of Chinese towns are over the 150 mark. China's and India's populations are mammoth enough that their outlying sex ratios have skewed the global average to a biologically impossible 107. But the imbalance is not only in Asia. Azerbaijan stands at 115, Georgia at 118 and Armenia at 120.

What is causing the skewed ratio: abortion. If the male number in the sex ratio is above 106, it means that couples are having abortions when they find out the mother is carrying a girl. By Ms. Hvistendahl's counting, there have been so many sex-selective abortions in the past three decades that 163 million girls, who by biological averages should have been born, are missing from the world. Moral horror aside, this is likely to be of very large consequence.

To read the entire article above, CLICK HERE.

From "Sex selection and the rise of Generation XY" by Ed Pilkington, UK Guardian 6/17/11

In 1979 China signed a $50m four-year deal with a UN body designed to help it control its spiralling population through family planning. It was the largest foreign aid package Beijing had accepted in almost 20 years.

But the funds became entwined in China's one-child policy that was just taking hold, and instead of sponsoring an education drive for small families, the money was used to pay for posters in Chinese villages proclaiming "You can abort it! But you cannot give birth to it."

The story of the complicity of the UNFPA, the UN's main population agency, in the tyranny of China's forced abortion policy is just one of the examples given in [Hvistendahl's] book that explores western involvement in what has become a modern scourge: sex selection.

"It took millions of dollars in funding from US organisations for sex determination and abortion to catch on in the developing world," she writes.

To read the entire article above, CLICK HERE.

China Focuses Its Totalitarian Birth Control

13 Million Unborn Murdered Annually in China

China's One-child Policy Propagates Gendercide

Females Victims of Sex-selection Abortion

Crisis in India: Millions of Missing Girls Aborted

Sweden Approves Sex-selection Abortion