According to the United Nations, 200 million girls are “missing” today due to sex-selective abortions or infanticide. There is an excellent documentary that was produced back in 2012 to highlight the tragedy. The trailer can be viewed here.
To put that into some kind of perspective the film says, “Today India and China eliminate more girls than the number of girls born in American every year.” It is what is rightly being referred to as a “gendercide”. This is because it is a “systematic and methodical extermination” of a gender group.
This is a subject that Dr David van Gend has said has even started to occur in Australia, an abhorrent practice which he appropriately labels as, “daughter slaughter”. Dr van Gend wrote in August last year:
A GP colleague of mine in Victoria, Mark Hobart, has already confronted this ethical nightmare under that state’s similar law. He was approached by an Indian couple at 19 weeks of pregnancy who wanted an abortion because they were having a girl and they only wanted a boy.
Do progressives think that fostering this abominable practice of sex-selection abortion, this cultural contempt for girls is striking a blow for feminism? Do they count it a triumph for women if our law affirms the ancient fantasy of feral men who seek sex without consequence, backed up by abortion on demand? Do they not care that the normalising of abortion will only intensify the epidemic of mental and emotional harm to women, coerced and panicked into creating a place of death in their bodies where there should be a place of life?
Similarly, Nancy R. Pearcey writes in her excellent Christian book, Love Thy Body: Answering Hard Questions about Life and Sexuality (Baker, 2018):
Archaeologists have discovered sewers clogged with the tiny bones of newborn babies dumped down the drain… Most of those babies were girls. In fact, it was rare for a Roman family to have more than one daughter. Historians have uncovered a letter written in the first century BC by a Roman soldier to his pregnant wife back home saying, “If it is a boy, let it live; if it is a girl, expose it.”
Pearcey goes on to rightly say:
In this context, the Christian church stood out for its high view of women. But prohibiting abortion and infanticide, it showed that it cherished the female contribution in bringing new life into the world, treating it as something worthy of respect and protection. Little girls were not to be thrown down the sewer but loved and cared for as much as boys. The early Christians went beyond simply condemning abortion to providing alternatives—rescuing and adopting children who had been abandoned.
What both Dr van Gend and Nancy Pearcey say is correct. As the word of God says in Deuteronomy 22:22-23, “Do not take advantage of a widow or an orphan. If you do and they cry out to me, I will certainly hear their cry.”