THE BRAVE new world in which we live makes it difficult to know how to react to research that suggests certain ethnic groups might be aborting girls because they prefer boys.
A 2018 Latrobe University study of more than a million births in Victoria found that, in key migrant communities, there were as many as 125 boys born for every 100 girls. This was a male birth rate 20% higher than if nature was left to take its course.
Lead researcher Dr Kristina Edvardsson said the results were evidence that “systematic discrimination against females starts in the womb”.
“We believe that some women may be terminating pregnancies after discovering they are expecting a girl,” she wrote.
Feminists should be outraged. There can be no worse form of misogyny than using ultrasound technology to track down females and kill them before they have a chance to be born.
But don’t expect females in the womb to be defended by feminists in the Parliament. The same women’s rights activists who were screaming “misogynist” at Tony Abbott when he dared to glance at his wristwatch while the then Prime Minister Julia Gillard was speaking will, themselves, not say a word to save the lives of their unborn sisters.
How can they?
If abortion is a matter of personal choice, as feminists insist, then the choice some ethnic women make to kill an unborn female for simply being female must be beyond criticism.
Feminists cannot very well yell at Catholic Nuns to “Keep your theology off my biology” whilst imposing their own ideology – non-discrimination against females – on those same pregnant women.
And whilst “Not Your Uterus, Not Your Business” fits nicely on a bumper sticker, “Not Your Uterus, Not Your Business … Unless I’m Killing a Female for Being a Female in Which Case I’m a Misogynist Whose Uterus Should Be the State’s Business” does not.
So feminists will continue to sacrifice their unborn sisters on the altar of “choice” in order to preserve women’s access to abortion so that more females can be targeted for termination by mothers wanting sons.
But then, who is to say that the females showing up on ultrasounds are in fact female?
In our brave new world of gender fluidity, the females being aborted may in fact be males whose gender was wrongly assigned by a doctor, gung-ho on science and not nearly attentive enough to gender theory.
How could a doctor with an ultrasound, observing nothing more than genitals, possibly know if the baby in the womb – about to be aborted – is actually female?
If gender is a social construct then no-one can be sure that the unborn baby, with a vagina and XX chromosomes, about to be aborted by an ethnic woman desperate for sons is actually female.
But even if we were to believe that objective, scientific evidence available to doctors is still valid in determining gender, who are we to impose our Western cultural values on the ethnic communities we have welcomed here?
Dr Edvardsson said that the Indian Government estimated two million girls “go missing” from its population every year because of gender-selective abortion. The custom of paying a dowry when a daughter marries means that giving birth to a girl is simply uneconomical. So the ancient dowry tradition has entrenched a modern-day preference for male children, a preference that migrants might bring with them.
Dr Edvardsson concluded that there was “evidence that prenatal sex selection may be taking place following migration to Australia”.
But who are we to criticize? Have we not agreed that the West – supposedly founded on genocide and the theft of land – is the last culture that should be lecturing others about what ought and ought not be done?
We will not talk about the targeted termination of unborn females within certain ethnic groups for the same reason that we will not talk about genital mutilation of born females in other ethnic groups. We haven’t the cultural confidence to say what is or is not acceptable.
So the Latrobe University research will be quietly filed away – even as unborn girls are quietly aborted for simply being girls – because abortion is sacrosanct, gender is fluid and Western values have been undermined to such an extent that we are no longer confident enough to articulate them, even in defense of defenseless females.
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James Macpherson is a Vice President at Alphacrucis College in Sydney. Prior to that worked was a News Ltd journalist and led Calvary Christian Church in Queensland. You can follow James on Twitter at @jamesmacpherson