March 14, 2007
Column #1,333
Advance for March 17, 2007
Holocaust of Female Babies
by Michael J. McManus

While 200,000 people have been slaughtered in the Darfur area of Sudan, there is a much more horrific holocaust underway that has killed perhaps100 million female babies. 

This is a war "against nature, civilization and in fact humanity itself," says Dr. Nicholas Eberstadt of the American Enterprise Institute.

It is so serious that millions of men are unable to find wives, and are paying to have them stolen from other countries, and sold in vast sex trafficking schemes.

Yet have you heard of this issue?  I bet not. This slaughter is happening under the world's radar and has been barely reported by the press.

One exception was a recent four-part series by Julia Duin in "The Washington Times,"  which reported that for thousands of years in India, many female babies were either "poisoned, buried alive or strangled." However, the situation has become much worse after the legalization of abortion in 1971 and the advent of the sonogram which enabled women to discern the sex of her child in the womb by the fourth month of her pregnancy. That made it possible to abort females before anyone knew a woman was pregnant.

In 2001, only 927 girls were born compared to every 1,000 boys, below the natural birth rate of 952 to 1,000. However, in the capital city of New Delhi, the ratio plummeted to 814 per 1,000.  "It is a matter of international and national shame for us that India, with economic growth of 9 percent still kills its daughters," Renuka Chowbury, a Cabinet member told the Indian press.

The British medical journal, Lancelet estimated India's male-female gap at 45 million China's at 50 million, and cited others in Pakistan, South Korea, and Nepal with a total of 100 million "missing girls" world wide.  This is genocide on an unprecedented scale.

Furthermore, it is likely to grow worse for two reasons.  China has limited the number of children each family can have to one birth only. That often results in that birth being male, with the females being aborted. So many girl babies have not been born, that China itself estimates that men will outnumber women by a staggering 300 million by 2020.

In India the issue is complicated by the traditional Hindu wedding which requires the parents of the bride to give thousands of dollars, not the groom but to his parents.  The sum is so exorbitant, that pregnant women often abort their female child to avoid those costs..  Or worse, the new baby is put on piles of dry leaves and burned.

Sex-selected abortions are being called "female feticide."  Duin quoted Swami Agnivesh, president of the World Council of Arya Samai, a Hindu reform movement which opposes all abortions, and blames his own faith as promoting female feticides:

"We in the religious world are most responsible," he said in his New Delhi office seated in bright orange robes. "The Hindu religious establishment is completely rotted from within. It has moved away from the universal values of the Vedas and Upanishads (scriptures)."

"The real worship is to respect the girl child. The false goddesses are worshiped and the real goddesses are slaughtered."

China and India account for 40 percent of the world's population.  Their slaughter of 100 million  female babies has frightening global implications. If China alone adds 250 million more in the next 13 years, it will be a roaring jet engine that will drive the trafficking of human beings across national boundaries to astronomical levels. Some 700,000 people are sold into bondage now, mostly as prostitutes. We could be seeing that figure rise 10-20 fold.

Already, a new class of wifeless men are scouring eastern India, Bangladesh and Nepal for available women. "India, already a world leader in sex trafficking is absorbing a new trade of girls kidnaped or sold from their homes and shipped across the country" Duin writes.

What can be done about this?  Last week the U.S. Government tried to persuade a UN Commission on the Status of Women to call on countries to eliminate prenatal sex selection and female infanticide.  Predictably, China and India lobbied against it, but they were supported by the European Union and  Canada.  Why?  EU and Canada don't want to put any limits on abortion.

"The final draft document was so watered down, abortion was not mentioned," said Wendy Wright, President of Concerned Women for America. "It is one of the worse human rights abuses, killing defenseless babies because they are girls."

It is time for the Pope and other religious leaders to fight this horror.