Pro-Choice Feminists Support "Woman-on-Woman Violence"

Doug Bandow is a senior fellow at the Cato Institute. He is the author of several books including Beyond Good Intentions: A Biblical View of Politics. Below are excerpts from his article "Roe v. Wade: Four Decades of Tragedy," (The American Spectator, 15 January 2013).

Roe v. Wade, perhaps the most ostentatiously unconstitutional of many dubious Supreme Court decisions purporting to interpret the Constitution, was issued 40 years ago. Rather than settle the abortion issue, the justices triggered a bitter political conflict which continues unabated. 

Roe represents tragedy. An unwanted pregnancy can cause serious, sometimes overwhelming, problems. Moreover, there are few more personal decisions than to terminate a pregnancy. Liberty and life seemingly come into sharp conflict.

But abortion is not a just another "choice." Rather, it is a flight from responsibility. Abortion is a response to choice, that is, the decision to have sex. Other than rape, sex is voluntary. Sometimes the result is an unwanted baby.

The question then is what to do? What is a person’s responsibility for the earlier choice freely exercised? Abortion has become a leading means to avoid taking responsibility for the life created. ...

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... Whether the critical moment is conception or implantation, thus starts a process which, if not interrupted, results in a human being. The physical differences between a fetus, a baby, and a child, though real, do not affect the moral worth of the individual created. No one should be aborted without serious, if not overwhelming, justification.

There is one when the mother’s life is at stake. But not because someone would prefer not to have a baby at a particular time. The claim that abortion is an absolute right even when the pregnancy results from voluntary sex sacrifices life for convenience. For instance, last year blogger Allison Benedikt waxed eloquent in defending the right to kill one’s baby because one is a newlywed and not yet "ready for kids," a "single woman who wants to focus on her career," or "the mother of two who is not in the market for number three." All of these would be good reasons to eschew sex. Certainly they justify using birth control. And they create an understandable desire not to be pregnant. But they are not good reasons to eliminate a life, especially with adoption as an alternative.

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Yet there is at least one worse reason to abort a baby: sex selection. You want a kid. But you want a kid of a particular sex, usually male. Unfortunately, even with modern technology it’s hard to guarantee the result. No problem, argued Benedikt, who warned her pro-abortion allies against feeling guilty. Just kill the (mostly) female babies. After all, "these are fetuses with female or male genitals -- not little girls and little boys."...

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But abortion supporters still are stuck with sex selection abortion. No matter that sex discrimination is widely thought to be bad. If abortion is an absolute right, then the reason doesn’t matter, even if the purpose is to kill baby girls.

The problem isn’t theoretical. The child-gender ratio in India, which recently has been convulsed in outrage over a murderous gang rape, "is at its most lopsided in 50 years," reported the Washington Post earlier this month. Some of the lowest ratios of females to males occur in cities and provinces populated by the growing middle class. Observed the Post: "a growing number of couples opt to abort female fetuses or neglect infant girls in their desperation for sons."

China may pose an even greater problem. The age-old preference for boys -- who provide farm labor and carry the family name -- has been aggravated by the Maoist regime’s "one-child" policy. Although that restriction has been relaxed, China now has a dramatically malformed age and sex structure. Normal is 105 boys to 100 girls; in some provinces the ratio climbs above 130. A deadly preference for males also is found in Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Pakistan, South Korea, and Taiwan. All told, Mara Hvistendahl, author of Unnatural Selection: Choosing Boys Over Girls, and the Consequences of a World Full of Men, estimates that Asia lacks 160 million women who otherwise would be alive.

A similar phenomenon is evident in Armenia, Azerbaijan, Kosovo, and elsewhere in Eastern Europe. Some immigrant-heavy Canadian provinces exhibit a similar pattern, as do America’s ethnic Chinese, Indian, and Korean populations. Indeed, Kohm argued that "Sex selection abortion, or sex preselection as it may also be labeled, is rapidly becoming an acceptable family planning alternative for Americans."

Kohm went on to call the practice "woman-on-woman violence." If it is a woman’s choice to have an abortion, then sex selection abortion usually means women (adults) killing women (babies). That is, complained Kohm, women "insist on putting self desire for a child of a certain sex above common good to all women by aborting female fetuses."...