In Sacha Baron Cohen’s (Borat and Bruno) new movie The Dictator, his film-wife tells him she’s pregnant in one scene. His response: “Are you having a boy or an abortion?”
This line is only funny if you like shock comedy. It packs a punch because it’s true.
It’s a well-documented fact that sex ratios are skewed to biologically impossible levels in countries like China and India because of gender-based abortions. From 1981 to 1986 alone, Chinese women underwent 67 million abortions because of the one-child policy, a government act designed to limit the population growth of the world’s most populous nation. Thirty years later, it’s still fueling China’s strong cultural preference for boys, and perpetuating an unimaginable number of girl-child abortions.
India, with its oppressive (though technically illegal) dowry system, continues to devalue girls and leads to millions of abortions when an ultrasound reveals a female fetus. In both countries, sex-selective abortion—and even ultrasound used for the purpose of determining a child’s sex—is illegal. Even so, the problem persists. Boys are simply more prized than girls.
Mara Hvistendahl, author of Unnatural Selection: Choosing Boys over Girls, and the Consequences of a World Full of Men, traces the many problems associated with a world where more than 160 million girls are missing, largely because of sex-selective abortions. “Gender imbalance has been treated as a local problem, as something that happens to other countries,” she says. “The gender imbalance is a local problem in the way a superpower’s financial crisis is a local problem, in the way a neighboring country’s war is a local problem. Sooner or later, it affects you.”
In America, sooner or later was last week.
Republicans tried to rally support to ban sex-selective abortions in our country when they introduced the Prenatal Nondiscrimination Act (PRENDA) to the House in late May. The time seemed right.
A recent Gallup poll showed that a near-record half of Americans consider themselves “pro-life.” Those who described themselves as “pro-choice” declined to a record low 41 percent, compared to 47 percent in July 2011.
In a Washington Post guest blog post, Catholic writer Ashley McGuire attributes this attitudinal shift in part to modern technology, which has helped humanize the fetus. With various pregnancy websites, smartphone apps, and 4D ultrasound now readily available, mothers can track their baby’s development from the moment of conception. “She learns her baby’s heart starts beating at a mere 21 days after conception (before many women learn they are pregnant). She meets her baby on the ultrasound screen at eight weeks as opposed to at the end of nine months,” says McGuire.
She also thinks more Americans are seeing how abortion is used to undermine the rights of women around the globe, whether by forced abortion in China or gender-selective abortion worldwide. “Abortion is increasingly hard to square with women’s empowerment when it is the single greatest contributor tipping the scale towards a world with fewer women,” she says.
According to McGuire, the pro-life camp realizes the power of framing abortion as a human rights issue, too. Many past civil rights movements in this country, she points out, were deeply rooted in religious conviction. The move to end slavery, the fight for women’s suffrage—with each of these movements there was a tipping point where Americans moved beyond religious conviction and recognized the social justice issue at stake and got behind the cause. This is happening with abortion in America, McGuire says.
Even Hvistendahl, a staunch pro-choice advocate, acknowledges the problem of women choosing to abort based on the baby’s sex. In a world overrun with men, killing off too many girls is creating significant ripple effects, such as an increase in human trafficking, because of a shortfall in both the labor and sex pool. Gendercide, especially in places like China and India, poses a grave threat to the world. Sex-selective abortion isn’t about being pro-life or pro-choice; it’s a human rights issue, she says.
Just days before debate over the bill commenced, the pro-life group Live Action released a hidden camera video taken at a Planned Parenthood clinic in Texas. In the video, a woman posing as an expectant mother asks for advice about terminating her pregnancy if she discovers the baby is a girl. The Planned Parenthood counselor advises her to wait until she’s at least five months to get an ultrasound so she can be sure of the infant’s sex. At that point, she could return for a late-term abortion. Even the most ardent advocates of abortion will squirm to hear the advice she receives for ending her pregnancy if it’s a girl.
Between growing evidence and the stats on American’s seeming receptiveness to the pro-life label, PRENDA should have easily passed if it truly reflected the people. Instead, it failed 246-168, “derailed by partisan politics and the debate du jour over the ‘war on women.‘”
Also, Planned Parenthood issued a statement indicating the staff member in the video no longer works for the company, and all other employees at the clinic were “immediately scheduled for retraining in managing unusual patient encounters.”
Of the 3,700 abortions that are performed every day in America, it’s difficult to quantify how frequently someone at Planned Parenthood might experience an “unusual patient encounter.” The exact number of gender-based abortions in our country is unknown. There is some evidence, however, that sex-selective abortions are happening in America, especially among some immigrant populations who have imported their cultural bias for boys and are more apt to select against girls. “Gendercide” is not just an issue for China and India. It’s happening here at home too.
From Planned Parenthood to the 86 percent of Americans who said sex-selective abortions should be outlawed, virtually everyone agrees that aborting a child on the basis of its gender is unethical—even inhumane. And yet, as Hvistendahl points out in her book, the pro-choice camp generally remains silent on this “human rights issue.” To draw a line in the sand and fight to end it would mean giving up hard-won ground since Roe v. Wade. Slate argued for why pro-choicers should be okay with sex-selection abortion, but such an argument is rare and startling, like the one made in a medical journal for after-birth abortion.
As Rachel Held Evans argued here, women should opt out of becoming ammunition in the “war on women.” Lawmakers on both sides have turned sex-selection abortion into yet another a pawn, but war looks very different depending on what side of the battle you’re on. For women in China, India, and other places in the world where girls have little value, the war on women is a fight to save millions of lives that are being ended. In America, it’s a battle for rights. Instead of the two sides coming together to rescue preborn girls from peril, gendercide will merely remain a political lightening rod. Both sides, Republicans and Democrats, pro-life and pro-choice, will dig their heels in further.
In a recent interview, New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof told me, “Each side propels itself toward areas that are hardest to find agreement on because they’re the areas that seem to be defined as most important.” Instead of digging our heels in on issues that are divisive, why not find areas where we share common ground, such as maternal health, he suggested. “Both sides think women shouldn’t die in childbirth; both agree that women should have their fistulas repaired.” Whether you’re pro-life or pro-choice, everyone can agree these are issues that should be addressed vigorously.
Kristof may be right—both sides would probably make real progress on addressing oppression against girls and women if we focused on areas of agreement rather than continually spending our energy on issues where the river is too wide to cross. Doing something to lift women out of oppression is better than doing nothing.
But while we’re busy tackling other problems—empowering women by educating them, or providing life-saving healthcare during childbirth—exponentially more daughters will die because we’re too busy protecting their mother’s right to choose, even if it that choice means they’re free to select against their own kind. Where is the logic in this Machiavellian plot twist?
if this is what we’ve come to, one seemingly obvious way to empower women seems too late for a law.
Marian V. Liautaud is the editor of church management resources at Christianity Today. Watch for her upcoming feature article on gendercide in the October issue of Christianity Today magazine.
Remember that cheesy ’70s TV show, The Love Boat? And its lovable pilot, Captain Stubing? Of course you do.
These days, Stubing – er, actor Gavin MacLeod – is making family-friendly movies with Christian themes, including The Secrets of Jonathan Sperry, now showing in limited theaters. Set in 1970, it’s a story about a young boy who befriends an old man.
I’m going to let you in on a little secret I’ve never talked about with anyone. On November 2, 2008, I walked into a polling booth in Glendora, California, and voted for Proposition 8, which sought to add the clause “Only marriage between a man and a woman is valid or recognized in California.”
Why the secrecy? It’s not because I’m ashamed of my views or regret the way I voted. Instead, it’s because I don’t want to be associated with far-rightpastors who preachhatred and violenceagainstgay people. And I’m not alone. Polls indicate that half if not the majority of voters in the United States support legalizing gay marriage, and yet in all 32 states where gay marriage has been on the ballot, voters have rejected it. I believe this disconnect between what voters tell pollsters and how they vote has to do with how their views are represented by the media—that if they publicly express their discomfort with the legalization of gay marriage, they will be associated with the likes of Charles Worley.
Pastor Worley, in a sermon to his North Carolina Baptist congregation last month, evoked Hitler in suggesting that gays and lesbians should be quarantined in something like a concentration camp. “Have that fence electrified so [the homosexuals] can’t get out. Feed ’em, and- And you know what? In a few years they’ll die out. You know why? They can’t reproduce.”
Groups like the Anti-Defamation League and American United condemned Worley’s comments, which went viral on YouTube, while Christian bloggers on both the Right and the Left were quick to denounce his message.
Perhaps because of the extreme views of Christians like Worley, no matter the context—whether I’m talking with good friends, interacting with work colleagues, or just reading an article online—people who support gay marriage view Christians who oppose it as bigoted, backwards, or some variation thereof. This happens often enough in the media, and it doesn’t need to happen between Christians. I am not Charles Worley, and I’m tired of others, especially fellow Christians, assuming that because I’m opposed to gay marriage that I’m hateful like him. It’s time to extend a hermeneutic of grace to each other—especially to fellow Christians who still do not favor gay marriage and believe that homosexuality is not God’s intent for human sexuality. My Christian faith informs my views on homosexuality and gay marriage, but so does my love for Brian.
if anybody ever had angel eyes, it was my baby cousin Brian. His eyes were the color of the Arizona desert sky at high noon, but it wasn’t the color that made them so angelic—it was the way they shimmered when he laughed. Brian had such a sanguine personality it seemed his little body couldn’t contain his joy—his deep belly laughs bubbled over at the smallest provocation. His mother would say she thought it was her job to protect that smile straight through to his adulthood, but I doubt she could’ve predicted what would happen to him.
Brian was always a social misfit. At age 15, he’d rather have his nose buried in some science-fiction novel than play sports. As a reward for making honor roll, he’d ask for things like the unedited version of Les Miserables. He wasn’t great at small talk and his face would turn tomato red anytime a girl smiled at him. All this strained his relationships with his peers. And they were merciless. Gay, queer, and fag were regular epithets either hurled his way or whispered behind him just within earshot.
I was heartbroken as I watched what this did to him over the years. His eyes, now a mossy green, didn’t shimmer anymore, and that joyful disposition was buried down deep, if it was still there at all. I did what I could by telling him to stand up for himself and telling him that what others said did not define him, but there was little else I could do. For who can quiet the voices of adolescent boys? By the time he came out as gay to his family, a whole world of damage had already been done to his soul. In the end, I watched him bullied not to the point of suicide, but to the point of another kind of death, a social death in which he alienated himself from everyone, even his closest family members.
I don’t love Brian any less because he’s gay. He’s kind, brilliant, and full of beautiful ideas. The world would be such a lesser place without him. But in my mind, sexuality is a one-way street. And when I see someone I love going the wrong way down a one-way street, the most loving response is to say, “No, wait! That’s the wrong way! That way only ends in pain.”
I understand that Christians who support homosexuality and gay marriage don’t view it as a one-way street, that they see gay marriage as a justice and civil rights issue. I’m not asking for anyone to approve or accept my views, but I am asking for Christians to be kind to one another, no matter which side they’re on. In particular, I am asking Christians who support legalizing gay marriage to not assume fellow Christians like me are hateful, bigoted, backwards, or just plain mean because we oppose legalizing gay marriage.
The truth is, most of those who share my view are not like Pastor Worley, and most of those who support gay marriage aren’t in favor of some drunken Woodstock free-for-all. Most of us are in the silent middle, and each believes that our view is loving, but the truth is that none of us are loving if we continue to browbeat people who don’t agree with us.
I’m not in favor of gay marriage, but that doesn’t mean I’m unsympathetic of how many gay people suffer. When someone you love is gay, you don’t have the luxury of looking at this issue from the safe distance of an ivory tower or a picket line. Every day I deal with what happened to Brian. I have a front-row seat on the horror that his life has become because of bullying and people like Worley. With the long election season looming ahead, can’t Christians assume the best about one another, no matter how differently we see things?
“The film is about forgiveness,” MacLeod, a Christian, told Fox News. “Forgiveness is one of the greatest tools God has given us.”
> The Great Reverse is a compelling documentary about nine students who take a months-long missions trip to West Africa, experiencing culture shock and God’s grace along the road. It’s worth watching for anyone considering a short-term missions trip. The soundtrack features artists as diverse as MercyMe, Seabird, Sara Groves, Jars of Clay, Sleeping At Last, Jon Foreman, Lori Chaffer and more.
>The Fabric of Time, a docudrama which examines physical evidence of the resurrection of Jesus Christ, is being re-mastered in 3-D by Grizzly Adams, gearing up for an April 2010 release. The European release is timed to coincide with the first public viewing in more than a decade of the Shroud of Turin, believed by millions of Christians to be the burial cloth of Jesus.
