Killing our girls in the name of feminism

Pro-life women are regularly told that we aren’t “real feminists” because feminism is predicated on support for abortion on demand. You see it everywhere, from being disinvited to the Women’s March to the attacks on Sen. Susan Collins’ female staffers.

Now the real feminists over at NARAL Pro-Choice America have dialed it up to eleven:

If it doesn’t matter why someone has an abortion, then sex-selective abortion (abortion to eliminate a child of an undesired sex) is totally cool because … women’s empowerment?

The United Nations Population Fund estimates that by 2020, over 140 million women and girls will be lost due to gender-biased sex selection. As secretary of state, Hillary Clinton expressed her opposition to what the U.N. termed “female infanticide.”

In one of her first interviews as secretary in 2009, she mentioned the “overwhelmingly high” rate of infanticide in India and China and stated that “unfortunately with technology, parents are able to use sonograms to determine the sex of a baby, and to abort girl children simply because they’d rather have a boy.”

Tragically, we know this is not just an international problem. It happens here in the United States, which is why my colleagues at Americans United for Life drafted legislation called the Prenatal Nondiscrimination Act, which bans abortion on the basis of sex, genetic abnormality, or the presence of Down syndrome. So far, eight states have passed laws banning sex-selective abortion.

That means in 42 states it is perfectly legal to obtain an abortion for the simple reason that you don’t want a baby girl.

As a pro-life feminist, I believe that no one should be denied the right to life on the basis of sex. There is nothing feminist about supporting the preference of boys over girls. Platitudes about equality between the sexes are pretty hollow if little girls don’t even get the chance to be born.

The extremists at NARAL are willing to sacrifice equality for baby girls in favor of abortion on demand. But they’re wrong. It does matter why someone chooses to have an abortion, and no child should be denied the chance at life because of her sex.

Katie Glenn (@KatieGlenn_) is a contributor to the Washington Examiner’s Beltway Confidential blog. She is the government Affairs counsel at Americans United for Life (@AUL).

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