Think sex-selective abortions—known as gendercide—happen only in China? Wrong. This week, Live Action films produced an undercover video of a Texas Planned Parenthood employee explaining to a patient how to easily obtain an abortion if her unborn child were a girl and not a boy. The employee also gave the patient guidance on committing Medicaid fraud while she waited to find out the baby’s sex—but that point deserves a separate discussion altogether.
Sex-selective abortions have been publicly debated recently due to forced abortion opponent and Chinese dissident Chen Guangchang. Guangcheng found himself in danger because of his opposition to China’s one-child policy that often perpetuates gendercide. It has caused a heated and necessary discussion of the issue worldwide.
Americans aren’t taking sex-selective abortion lightly. Tomorrow, a bill that would ban sex-selective abortions in the U.S. is up for a vote in the House. The Prenatal Nondiscrimination Act (PRENDA) would also punish doctors if they perform gendercide, which usually occurs in the second or third trimester, when the baby’s sex is clearly determined.
The option may seem rare, but the facts speak for themselves. For Chinese, Korean, and Indian parents having families and raising children in the U.S., researchers found that a firstborn girl often skews the sex ratio of the following children. For second births, the male-female ratio was 117 to 100, and for third births, it was 151 to 100 if the couple already had two girls.
Girls receive the brunt of gendercide due to cultural stigma, and that’s not going to change. Unless sex-selective abortion is outlawed, the human rights of unborn children, especially girls, will continue to be violated in the United States.
Earlier this year, Heritage reported a sobering statement from Steven W. Mosher, president of the Population Research Institute. In a congressional hearing, Mosher said that until recent negative publicity, “It was not unusual to find abortionists advertising the availability of sex-selective abortions in newspapers such as The New York Times.”
Thankfully, such publicity surfaced, and now America can debate this horrific practice in the light of day. Today, the world is missing more than 160 million women because of gendercide. While the U.S. can’t end the practice worldwide, it can restore human rights to unborn children in America.
The PRENDA bill is sponsored by Representative Trent Franks (R–AZ), who said, “As Americans, all of us know in our hearts that aborting a little baby because…she is a little girl instead of a little boy is fundamentally wrong, and represents a betrayal of the precious truth that all human beings are created equal.”
Pro-abortion feminist organizations like NARAL are claiming that PRENDA discriminates against women by interfering with their “choice” to abort female babies. It is hard to imagine a position more retrograde toward women than one that allows for their systematic elimination.
As Heritage’s Jennifer Marshall and Sarah Torre wrote recently, “If there is equality between women and men, it’s rooted in our nature and purpose as human beings. Denying that fundamental dignity inherent in all human life destroys the very basis of equality.”
On behalf of the millions of girls whose lives have been taken, let’s finally unite behind the clear and uncontroversial principle that gendercide is wrong and that America should do something to stop it.
