Abortion Politics and the Millions of ‘Missing’ Girls

An estimated 160 million Indian and Chinese females who have been either aborted or murdered as newborns – just because they were girls, Rob Kiener reports in “Gendercide Crisis,” the latest CQ Global Researcher. Because they don’t appear in demographic tallies, they are known as the “missing” girls. In recent decades Asia’s traditional anti-female bias has combined with falling fertility rates, China’s one-child policy, new high-tech prenatal gender-detection tools and easy access to abortion to produce unprecedented gender imbalances in the region. Some of Asia’s skewed sex ratios stem from girls’ parents wanting to avoid having to pay exorbitant dowries. Women also leave home to care for their husbands and in-laws, while sons, by tradition, care for their elderly parents. Aside from causing the deaths of millions of baby girls, Asia’s gendercide crisis means that by 2021 India will have 20 percent more men than women, and by 2050, up to 50 million men will be unable to find wives in China.

Abortion politics also enters into the story. “Where are the feminists?” Steven Mosher, president of the conservative Population Research Institute, asked of Kiener. Why aren’t they outraged about this “terrible form of sex discrimination that is killing so many unborn baby girls?” Women’s-rights advocates told Kiener that feminist groups are silent because they don’t want to support any limits on a woman’s right to an abortion. Anti-abortion proponents like Mosher, they say, are using the gendercide issue to push for a ban on all abortions.

Asia’s gender imbalance already has led to increased kidnapping and trafficking in women and higher prostitution rates in the region. And experts worry that having so many unmarried men could threaten stability and security, leading to “the criminalization of society.”

See the report at: http://library.cqpress.com/globalresearcher/cqrglobal2011100400

--Kathy Koch, Managing Editor, CQ Global Researcher