From George Weigel’s most recent column, “The war on (little) women and other insanities” (July 20th):
That forces that defend Roe vs. Wade know the fragility of that “exercise in raw judicial power” (as Justice Byron White, dissenting from the Roe majority, put it) is. That is why they defend it with such fury — and with arguments that are increasingly absurd. Those absurdities were on full display in late May when the U.S. House of Representatives took up the Prenatal Nondiscrimination Act. PRENDA’s purpose is to ban sex-selection abortions in the United States – which almost always means aborting unborn girls for the simple reason that theyare girls.
This odious practice, a commonplace in Asia (where there are estimates of some 160 million “missing” females), is not, yet, widespread in the U.S. But one sex-selection abortion is one too many, and the attitude to this war on little women within the billion dollar abortion industry is chilling: a Planned Parenthood representative told the Huffington Post, prior to the House vote on PRENDA, that “No Planned Parenthood clinic will deny a woman an abortion based on her reasons for wanting one, except in states that explicitly prohibit sex-selection abortions.” As Congressman Chris Smith (R-NJ) put it in an op-ed piece in the Washington Post, “In other words, Planned Parenthood is okay with exterminating a child in its huge network of clinics simply because she’s a girl.”
The arguments against PRENDA in the House were ludicrous. The proponents of Roe‘s unlimited abortion license, which they had long defended on the grounds that ready access to abortion is essential to women’s equality, argued that lethal discrimination against (little) women just because they are girls must be legally permissible. Radical feminism is now consuming its own future, literally.
And why? To defend Roe vs. Wade — and, ultimately, the sexual revolution for which Roe vs. Wade was and is the ultimate technological buttress.
Read the entire piece. Christopher White, in a recent essay for Catholic World Report, wrote of “gendercide”—and the blind eye so many are turning to it:
For several years now, issues of sex-selective abortions abroad have been couched in terms of “abuses to human rights” and “an affront to women’s equality” by U.S. policymakers and international officials. Yet, as the recent debates in the U.S. Congress evidence, pro-choice defenders are unwilling to use the same rhetoric in speaking on the matter at home. Here, the issue is being framed in terms of “women’s choice” or “women’s health.” And, at the heart of the debate is the unwillingness of Clinton, Obama, and others to impose any types of limits on abortion. For them, the slightest admission that abortion just might be harmful or damaging to women is an admission both impossible and untenable. Clinton, like many of her counterparts, have staked their defense of legal abortion as a means of supposed protection used by women to shield themselves and protect their futures, their bodies, and their freedoms. Yet, as Live Action’s video footage has revealed—or more correctly, made clear to those that had any doubts about the practice—abortion is truly a sword used to fight for a lifestyle of sexual freedom and liberation, in which its adherents will accept no limits or constraints.
It’s a Girl serves as a powerful witness to what happens to any society when the dignity of all life fails to receive respect and protection. The gendercide of girls that has taken place over the last thirty years in China and India is evidence of the limitless atrocities that can occur under the banner of “freedom” and “choice” when the most vulnerable are considered dispensable and merely a casualty in efforts to promote equality. In her 1995 Beijing address, Clinton noted that the abuses of women “have continued because, for too long, the history of women has been a history of silence.” For now, the video footage of Live Action and the filmmakers of It’s a Girl are just two of many such efforts to break the silence, though for now they remain voices that are crying in the wilderness, desperate for help. Will we hear them?
If you value the news and views Catholic World Report provides, please consider donating to support our efforts. Your contribution will help us continue to make CWR available to all readers worldwide for free, without a subscription. Thank you for your generosity!
Click here for more information on donating to CWR. Click here to sign up for our newsletter.