Killing Girls

by Gene Shelburne

In much of the Far East the birth of a girl is seen as a financial disaster for her family.

Although the dowry system is now illegal in India, families still may be forced to pay thousands of dollars to obtain a suitable husband for a daughter. Consequently, in India modern amniocentesis and ultrasound tests that allow Western parents to identify fetal defects and treat them before birth are being used illegally by thousands of couples to determine the sex of their unborn child. If the baby is a girl, her parents may elect for her never to be born.

Pressures on a mother to kill her girl-child can mount incredibly as her husband and all her extended family unite in urging her to avert the budget crisis.

Every year in India alone 5 million women abort their unborn baby girls. So the number of girls reaching school age is shrinking. Girls in most places outnumber boys, but in India last year the ratio was 933 to 1,000.

A recent report in Christianity Today tells of one 31-year-old Hindu mother who has undergone four abortions after learning each time that her fetus was female.

In many Chinese provinces stringent laws allow couples to have only one child. So for a different reason but with the same result, in China the ratio of girls and boys is beginning to resemble that of India.

All of this poses a sticky dilemma for radical feminists. For several decades now their battle cry has been abortion on demand.

“Abortion is every woman’s constitutional right,” they have loudly trumpeted. “Nobody has the right to tell any woman what to do about the contents of her womb.”

Over and over the NOW gang has chanted this mantra. It has been the litmus test of radical feminism.

So what will these advocates of unrestricted abortion say now to the mothers of India?

Now that the feminists’ favorite surgical procedure has become the method of choice to exterminate females in so much of our world, will they change their message and begin to attack abortion as an evil choice?

In India and China, Christians are a tiny minority, so Christian belief in the dignity of life created in the image of God is a message rarely spoken and barely heard.

But you and I live in a land seen by most non-Americans as a Christian nation. Are we doing much better in selling our own society on the sanctity of human life?