- Jules Gomes
How can feminists condone this massacre of unborn girls?
‘In our country, 50,000 babies are aborted every month for one reason: they are girls instead of boys. India’s skewed sex ratio shows that, as a nation, we have failed girls. They are either aborted or, once born, subject to various forms of violence. It’s time to address this issue, especially on the National Girl Child Day. Whoever believes that women share the same rights as men cannot turn a blind eye to what is happening in India today.’
This statement from the human rights organisation ADF spearheaded an awareness campaign launched by the Chief Minister of Delhi to protect girls in the womb. India is finally addressing a problem that amounts to an ongoing gendercide of 63 million unborn female babies to date, according to India’s annual economic survey, and 100 million girls worldwide, according to Indian economist and Nobel laureate Amartya Sen.
In 2014, another report acknowledged that female foeticide had led to a shortfall of 200 million girls worldwide. And an investigation by the Independent revealed that the barbaric practice is not confined to the developing world. It is ‘widely practised within some ethnic communities in Britain and has resulted in significant shortfalls in the proportion of girls’.
The investigation also noted that the ‘practice of sex-selective abortion is now so commonplace that it has affected the natural 50:50 balance of boys to girls within some immigrant groups and has led to the “disappearance” of between 1,400 and 4,700 females from the national census records of England and Wales.’
No one should face the death penalty for simply
being a girl.
Decades ago Prof Sen had warned that the tens of millions of ‘missing women’, annihilated by gender-based abortions, were a new form of sex discrimination. ‘The numbers are very large indeed . . . I found the number of missing women in China to be 44m, in India 37m, and so on, with a total that easily exceeded 100m worldwide, a decade or so ago,’ Sen wrote in the British Medical Journal (2003).
But where have the feminists been while all this was being revealed? Our bra-burning and pussy-hat-wearing feminists said not a word in defence of the unborn girl-child.
In defiance of the statistics, über-feminist Sarah Ditum fatuously claimed that there was ‘no demographic evidence of women practising sex selective abortion in Britain’ and that the scandal was ‘based on a totally fictive set-up’. In the same breath, however, she went on to advocate female foeticide on the basis of choice. ‘As far as I’m concerned, it doesn’t matter why any woman wants to end her pregnancy. If it’s to select for sex, that’s her choice.’
Our bra-burning and pussy-hat-wearing feminists said not a word in defence of the unborn girl-child.
Dr Alex Allinson, a general practitioner who is a Member of the House of Keys (MHK) in the Isle of Man, would applaud Sarah Ditum’s bloodthirsty bravado. He has pushed through his Abortion Reform Bill (2018) in Tynwald, the island’s parliament, which would formally legalise sex-selective abortion for the first time in the British Isles, according to Stop Gendercide.
Dr Allinson’s Bill legalises sex-selective abortion de iure up to 14 weeks. The Bill would also enable sex-selective abortion de facto at least up to 24 weeks. This is because the Bill allows for abortion after 14 weeks if ‘there are serious social grounds justifying the termination of the pregnancy’. These bases are so poorly defined that they may be expected to be abused in similar ways to the ‘social clause’ of the Abortion Act 1967 in Great Britain. The abuse of Manx addresses to gain access to Manx abortions would also create the possibility of ‘abortion tourism’ for sex-selective purposes to the Island, says Stop Gendercide.
In the UK, sex selection is de iure illegal. De facto, it is possible due to abortion on demand up to 24 weeks. In 2015, Conservative MP Fiona Bruce proposed an amendment to the Serious Crime Bill, which would explicitly outlaw abortion on the basis of gender. However, an anti-life coalition of feminists and Leftists led by Ann Furedi, the ‘high priestess of abortion’ and head of the British Pregnancy Advisory Service (BPAS), the Trades Union Congress (TUC) and a number of women MPs voted down the Bill and threw it out of the House of Commons.
Dr Allinson's Bill would formally legalise sex-selective abortion for the first time in the British Isles.
Sex-selective abortion is illegal in India. The Pre-Natal Diagnostic Techniques (Regulation and Prevention of Misuse) Act, 1994 (PNDT), as amended in 2002, provides ‘for the prohibition of sex selection’. As a news reporter in Mumbai, I was part of an undercover operation to expose doctors who conducted sex-selective abortions. In a well-known abortion centre in Mumbai, out of 15,914 abortions performed during 1984-1985 almost 100 per cent involved girl babies. A survey of six hospitals in Mumbai found that out of 8, 000 foetuses aborted, 7,999 were female.
Indian female foeticide has its antecedents in female infanticide. The Lawrence Gazette (1871) records the manner in which girl babies were killed ‘by plunging their faces in milk’ or ‘strangled with a strong cord’ while in Gujarat girls were placed in an earthen pot and buried underground. In most cases, ‘they were made to swallow opium,’ or exposed to cold. A particular tribe in the Punjab, after murdering girls at birth, placed a piece of Gur (jaggery, or unrefined sugar) in their mouth and a roll of cotton in their hand, and repeated the words, ‘Feed on the gur, and spin the cotton. Come into the world no more, but send brothers’.
The British administration enacted the Female Infanticide Act of 1870, but failed to stop the practice of killing girl children, which continues in parts of India even today.
The issue of female foeticide and infanticide in India is compounded by religion. Hindus widely believe that a man cannot attain moksha (salvation) unless he has a son to light his funeral pyre. The ancient Hindu scripture Manu Smriti says that a ‘twice-born man who seeks final liberation, without having studied the Vedas, without having begotten sons, and without having offered sacrifices, sinks downwards’ (6.37). ‘By ‘(the procreation of) sons . . . this (human) body is made fit for (union with) Brahman’ (2.28). ‘Through a son he conquers the worlds, through a son’s son he obtains immortality, but through his son’s grandson he gains the world of the sun.’ It is the son who delivers his father from hell. (9.137-138). The Atharva Veda even has a charm for obtaining a son.
It is the son who delivers his father from hell.
‘It’s not feminism, it’s patriarchal religion that is butchering female babies,’ western feminists will say. They are wrong because the patriarchal religious narrative of Hinduism is counter-balanced in equal measure by goddess worship and by the concept of Shakti – the feminine being the very manifestation of power itself.
But shockingly, instead of supporting Shakti, the feminine power that will protect female babies, feminism has adopted the avatar of patriarchal Hinduism and is complicit with the form of religion that seeks to kill the female child.
In the 20th century, Communism murdered 100 million of its own citizens in the name of class emancipation and class equality, executing evil in the name of good. In the 21st century, feminism has already murdered 100 million babies of its own gender in the name of gender emancipation and gender equality, executing evil in the name of good.
As a feminist, do you want to save women or do you want to kill women on a scale that is tantamount to the genocide perpetrated by Communism? This is a question that Dr Allinson and those who support him in Tynwald must answer before feminism repeats the grave and grotesque mistakes of Communism.
(Originally published in The Conservative Woman)
Comments