A Dangerous World for Baby Girls

The world has become a dangerous place for baby girls. Even their families do not protect them. In many nations they are denied entrance at birth, and the United States is no exception.

Today the United States House of Representatives will debate the Prenatial Nondiscrimination Act (PRENDA), legislation that will lead to five years imprisonment for any doctor who performs or person who coerces a gender-based abortion. See the Washington Post piece here. Founder of Socrotates in the City and author of Amazing Grace, the William Wilberforce story, and the newest Deitrich Bonhoeffer biography Eric Metaxas shows how a flawed worldview has brought about this gendercide, at Breakpoint, at
http://www.breakpoint.org/bpcommentaries/entry/13/19465, and Nicholas Eberstadt discusses the global war on girls here. Read the Law of Life Project's recent post on this matter here.

This summer I'm working on several research projects, and one of them is entitled Gender Equality in an Age of Gendercide. I'll present this work at the South Eastern Association of Law Schools (SEALS) conference in a discussion on reproductive technology and its effects on family law teaching and scholarship. Here's a paragraph from that project:

"When gender equality's foundation relies on unregulated reproductive rights, and those rights work to the actual diminishment and severe detriment of females, accomplished largely by women's choices, gender equality is turned against itself, even cannibalized, resulting in a sabotage of women in colliding legal ideals. The challenge of teaching and writing about gender equality in this context of unfettered reproductive rights resulting in gendercide is not only formidable, but deserves discussion. Because prominent feminist legal theory requires an absolute right to abortion, it displays a serious hesitancy to embrace this conflict – undercutting gender equality at its foundation – and making gender equality all the more challenging to achieve because it requires a genuine look at the harms of abortion."

I have discussed abortion in terms of women's rights in general, and sex-selection abortion in particular, before in articles published by William & Mary journals, The Rise and Fall of Women's Rights: Have Sexuality and Reproductive Freedom Forfeited Victory? 6 William & Mary Journal of Women and Law 381, (Winter 2000)(co-authored with Colleen Holmes) at http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2007200; and Sex Selection Abortion and the Boomerang Effect of a Woman's Right to Choose: A Paradox of the Skeptics, 4 Wm & Mary J. Women & L. 91 (Winter 1997). Both of these articles detail the danger for women and girls presented by abortion.

Women can and must be at the forefront of making the world less dangerous for all babies, but for baby girls particularly in this perilous time for females. This is a vital fundamental principal of family restoration. I'll keep you posted on the progress....