According to a demographer from the American Enterprise Institute, that number “seems a bit low.” In China and India alone, men outnumber women by 70 million. The
Chinese Academy of Social Sciences has estimated that by next year, 24
million Chinese men of marriageable age will be unable to find a spouse.
Since mortality
rates are much higher for men than women, either Chinese and Indian
women are exceptionally unlucky, or, as is more likely, the lion’s share
of that 70-plus million represents women who were killed as the result
of sex-selection abortion.
That’s why both
China and India have done what the U. S. has not: outlaw sex-selection
abortion. While their laws are honored more in the breach than in the
observance, at least China and India have acknowledged the problem.
The cultural
preference for boys and systemic discrimination against girls is nothing
new. But the radical gender imbalance in places like China and India
is. Not coincidentally, that imbalance emerged just as abortion became
readily available in the 1970s. To put it bluntly, legal abortion made
it easier to eliminate unwanted daughters.
To put it even
more bluntly, gendercide isn’t the result of people having abortions for
the “wrong reason”—it’s the result of abortion itself. And though a
sexist act of violence halfway around the world should be just as
intolerable to us as if it were happening in our own backyard, make no
mistake. Elective abortion leads to sex-selective abortion. It is
happening in America, too.
Of course,
getting abortion-rights advocates to acknowledge this is like trying to
swim against the current of the Ganges from the Bay of Bengal to its
source in the Himalayas. Good luck with that.
Still, the savage
truth is hundreds of millions of missing women is the price we’ve paid
for legalized abortion. It’s the elephant in the room, and it isn’t
going anywhere.