In nature, 105 boys are born for every 100 girls. This ratio is biologically ironclad. Between 104 and 106 is the normal range, and that's as far as the natural window goes. Any other number is the result of unnatural events.
Yet today in India there are 112 boys born for every 100 girls. In China, the number is 121—though plenty of Chinese towns are over the 150 mark. China's and India's populations are mammoth enough that their outlying sex ratios have skewed the global average to a biologically impossible 107. But the imbalance is not only in Asia. Azerbaijan stands at 115, Georgia at 118 and Armenia at 120.
What is causing the skewed ratio: abortion. If the male number in the sex ratio is above 106, it means that couples are having abortions when they find out the mother is carrying a girl. By Ms. Hvistendahl's counting, there have been so many sex-selective abortions in the past three decades that 163 million girls, who by biological averages should have been born, are missing from the world. Moral horror aside, this is likely to be of very large consequence.
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Ms. Hvistendahl argues that such imbalances are portents of Very Bad Things to come. "Historically, societies in which men substantially outnumber women are not nice places to live," she writes. "Often they are unstable. Sometimes they are violent." As examples she notes that high sex ratios were at play as far back as the fourth century B.C. in Athens—a particularly bloody time in Greek history—and during China's Taiping Rebellion in the mid-19th century. (Both eras featured widespread female infanticide.) She also notes that the dearth of women along the frontier in the American West probably had a lot to do with its being wild. In 1870, for instance, the sex ratio west of the Mississippi was 125 to 100. In California it was 166 to 100. In Nevada it was 320. In western Kansas, it was 768.
The contraceptive mentality says that we should be able to control our fertility without controlling our sexual urges. This encourages us to think we can get away with being selfish and the more selfish we become the the more killing unwanted children becomes feasible in our thinking. The idea of spacing out children by using natural family planning requires responsible and mature patterns of marital communication and self control. But contraception eliminates all need for communication or self-control and creates an entitlement mentality where we feel entitled to all the selfish pleasure we want with no consequences. The problem with that approach to sex is that it reduces it to an individualistic way of gratifying our own lusts instead of making it personal communication and and expression of personal commitment.
Gratifying our selfish lusts as individuals also is morally corrosive in a broader sense. It does not contribute to the self-discipline necessary for true community, but actively reduces such self-discipline. Abortion is basically an act of selfishness and no where is this more obvious than in sex-selection abortion.
The fact that feminism as a political movement will not oppose sex-selection abortion is telling. It shows that feminists understand that opposing abortion for any reason is fatal to their cause because all the major reasons for abortion are essentially selfish. If you start distinguishing between "legitimate" and "illegitimate" reasons for abortion, pretty soon most abortion will clearly appear to be illegitimate and feminists dread that outcome most of all.
Yet feminists claim that abortion "empowers" women. The use of the word "empower" suggests that the fundamental feminist worldview understands life to be a continuous struggle for survival and power. Contemporary feminism would not be possible without social Darwinism and Nietzschean ethics as its background. That is why it is open to eugenics and population control, as well as the agenda of eco-fascism.
Al Gore recently has been talking up population control as a logical extension of his eco-fascist alarmism. The pseudo crisis of overpopulation becomes a justification for elites using governments to seize control of the fertility of the population, which is to invade even the privacy of the family in order to exert control. The more they can move reproduction into the lab and under government regulation and thus destroy the family, the more totalitarian the rule of the social engineers can be. Here he is caught on camera talking about population control.
You will notice how glibly he uses the language of "empowering women and girls" as if he was liberating them from the oppression of the family. Of course that is how he thinks; he is a feminist. But notice what the real world outcome of the contraceptive mentality he is pushing actually is: 163 million murdered girls.
I don't know how anyone can regard being aborting as being "empowered." But what we need to understand is why feminists like Al Gore can remain unperturbed by sex-selection abortion even while pushing a population control agenda based on the contraceptive mentality as liberating. The key question is: "Liberating for whom?" Who get liberated? All women. No, just those who are strong enough and ruthless enough to impose their will on the weak, the young and the helpless. But if imposing one's will on those who are weaker is the meaning of liberation, how can it apply to all women? Of course, it can't. Not all women are going to be liberated if feminism wins.
This fact has become glaringly obvious in the way the liberal, feminist establishment has gone beserk in its hatred for Sarah Palin and other conservative women over the past few years. "Palin Derangement Syndrome" is the tag for a well-known, widespread phenomenon that at first glance is confusing. Why would women prostitute themselves for the leftist ideological cause by turning against another women who just happened to be running for the "wrong" party? Aren't feminists supposed to be for women? Isn't feminism more than partisan politics? It is only when you realize that feminism is anti-women that you can make sense of all this.
Feminism is essentially an expression of modern, Enlightenment, hedonistic, hyper-individualism. It is rooted in the ideas of Rousseau, Darwin and Nietzsche and it constitutes a clear rejection of natural law, absolute morality and Christianity itself. Trying to compromise with it is not likely to be any more successful than was the German Christian attempt to find common ground with the Nazis because it is inherently opposed to ideas that are basic and integral to Christianity.
The only force in the world that will stand up for the right to life for girls is the Christian Church. It won't be Islam, it won't be Enlightenment secularism, it won't be postmodernism and it certainly won't be feminism. Only the Christian Church has, as part of its bedrock teaching, the idea that procreation is not entirely under the control of individual humans, but involves a cooperation of the married couple with God. This conviction makes procreation mysterious and holy and it prevents all attempts to to reduce it to technology. And only when we see the conception and birth of children as a mysterious, holy, act of God in which we are privileged to participate then we do not see ourselves as manipulators and as in control.
To kill the innocent is to separate oneself from God and to incur Divine judgment. To advocate for an evil ideology that justifies killing the innocent for one's own convenience is to place oneself in opposition to Jesus and the love commandment. To go through the verbal and mental contortions necessary to turn prejudice against girls and women into the "empowerment of girls and women" is to display a capacity for self-deception that Romans 1 attributes to persistent, unrepentant, deliberate idolatry. The problem with feminism is is that it is a form of self-worship, idolatry of the self.
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