While stopping over in Moscow, ID last week, on the way home from Seattle, a friend handed me a copy of the July 5 Wall Street Journal. He thought an opinion piece by William McGurn would interest me. He was right. It's titled "The Moral Outrage of 'Missing' Girls," and references the increasingly visible, global disappearance of girls. Abort73's new Abortion and Gendercide page helps explain this tragedy. Our Stop Global Gendercide T-shirts provide a practical way for people to introduce this important subject (and Abort73) to those around them.

The starting point for this article is the public debate taking place between author, Maria Hvistendahl, and New York Times columnist, Ross Douthat, about her new book, Unnatural Selection: Choosing Boys Over Girls, and the Consequences of a World Full of Men. I haven't read the book, but I posted a 3rd-party review of it to the Abort73 Facebook page last month. The disagreement between Hvistendahl and Douthat centers on their differing views of who the victim is in the global disappearance of women. Hvistendahl says the victim is society at large, a society that must bear the consequences of a severe gender imbalance. Douthat argues that the primary victims are the missing girls themselves. Not surprisingly, Hvistendahl is a staunch abortion advocate. Douthat is not. He concludes his initial criticism of her assessment this way:

[The fact that skewed sex ratios increase prostitution and sex trafficking] are important points. But the sense of outrage that pervades her story seems to have been inspired by the missing girls themselves, not the consequences of their absence.

Here the anti-abortion side has it easier. We can say outright what’s implied on every page of “Unnatural Selection,” even if the author can’t quite bring herself around.

The tragedy of the world’s 160 million missing girls isn’t that they’re “missing.” The tragedy is that they’re dead.

Well said, but since I've already commented on this issue at some length, I'd like to simply point you now to the remarks that stood out to me most from last week's WSJ article. It's available online, but you have to be a WSJ subscriber (or create an online account) to read the entire thing. After noting that some Americans might take comfort in the fact that this issue is largely non-existent in the U.S. ("outside some Asian-American communities that show a preference for boybabies"), McGurn points out that Americans are just as likely to disproportionally abort undesirable babies as they are in Asia or Africa. We simply define "undesirable" along different lines. McGurn writes:

Let's begin with the 90% of fetuses diagnosed with Down syndrome that end up being aborted. Or enlightened New York City—where three African-American babies are aborted for every two live births. You can bet, moreover, that if ever we do indeed identify a "gay gene" or a genetic sequence that raises the odds of homosexuality, we'll see disproportionate abortions here as well.

There is another similarity between these disparities and the gender disparity that has engaged Ms. Hvistendahl's attention: They are mostly uncoerced. Today a Down syndrome child has a better chance than at any time in history of living a rich and rewarding life—yet less of a chance of being born. Nor are there Klansmen driving African-American women to Planned Parenthood clinics, however much the KKK might appreciate the outcome.

Years ago, I heard Gregg Cunningham ponder the connection between homosexuality, abortion, and the human genome project. It's not a new hypothesis, though I wonder how many pro-choice activists have adequately considered it. No matter what your view of homosexuality, it's almost certain that if a biological predisposition to homosexuality could be isolated and identified in the womb, huge numbers of babies would be aborted for no other reason than because they might be gay—just as countless babies are aborted today because they might have Down syndrome or might be a girl.

Feminists championed the abortion revolution 40 years ago, and now abortion is wiping out women across the globe. Planned Parenthood has long enjoyed the support of the GLBTA as they jointly seek to throw off established social mores. Wouldn't it be ironic if the homosexual community was to someday find itself targeted by this same institution? And this raises an important question. If it's wrong to abort a baby for being a girl or being gay or having Down syndrome, shouldn't it be wrong to abort a baby, period? It seems obvious, but you can't have it both ways.