The Tragedy of Gendercide for Girls, Women and Families

Gendercide is the mass killing of people of a particular gender, the fate of girls around the globe today, and reflects the low status of females and the shocking reality that women are missing in their millions as the practice of killing girls is advancing around the world with reproductive technology. [See The War on Baby Girls: Gendercide, The Economist, available at http://www.economist.com/node/15606229, (May 4, 2010)[hereinafter The War on Baby Girls]. "Women are missing in their millions—aborted, killed, neglected to death. In 1990 [] Indian economist, Amartya Sen, put the number at 100m; the toll is higher now." Id. See also "It's a Girl," the documentary film discussing the current state of this phenomenon. The Three Deadliest Words in the World, It's a Girl, http://www.itsagirlmovie.com/ (2011). See also Nicholas Eberstadt, The War Against Baby Girls: Sex-Selective Abortion Becomes a Worldwide Practice, May 1, 2011, at http://www.allgirlsallowed.org/category/content-type/research-article#ixzz1zeqVVeI1 (discussing the advancement of sex ratios favoring men in eastern and western nations).]

The bestseller on this topic today is reviewed in an article by Joseph Kohm, which can be found at "A Review of Mara Hvistendahl's Unnatural Selection" | First Things
http://www.firstthings.com/onthesquare/2012/07/a-review-of-mara-hvistendahlrsquos-unnatural-selection.

Hvistendahl puts the number of missing girls at more than 163 million in Asia alone, and Kohm offers a fabulous review of her work while confronting the problem of turning liberty into license that carries with it horrific consequences.

Gender discrimination barring females from life at the outset is a serious and dangerous tragedy occurring right before our eyes. I will be presenting a piece next week at the Southeast Association of Law Schools (SEALS) Conference at a Reproductive Rights Panel Discussion Group on this topic, and the dearth of coverage it receives in law school courses around the country due to the inability of most jurisprudence to deal with the dangers and severity of harm caused by unrestricted abortion, supposed to be a foundation of gender equality. You can access that article at SSRN here at http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2109680.

The gender discrimination impact of being a woman is still very real. When gender equality's foundation relies on unmodified reproductive rights, and those rights work to the actual diminishment of females accomplished principally by women's choices, gender equality is turned against itself, sabotaging women, girls, and families.