This month is Women’s History Month and highlights International Women’s Day. An important conversation American feminists would do well to have is about the ethics surrounding the United States’ abortion laws. They seem to mirror, of all nations worldwide, that of China’s.
China is one of the few nations with extremely liberal abortion laws, where abortions are widely performed and can take place at any stage of pregnancy. It also has no bans against sex-selective abortion, a practice that is a leading cause of gendercide in the country.
In China, preference for a boy child among couples having a third child runs rampant. The Congressional-Executive Commission on China’s 2024 report states that for every 133 Chinese boys, there are only 100 girls.
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The report links this phenomenon to the lasting effects of China’s communist one-child policy, now a three-child policy as of 2021. It also highlights the likelihood that this gender disparity encourages human trafficking of women and children throughout China and East Asia.
The long lasting effects of China’s population control efforts, like the one-child policy, have led to a predominantly gender-skewed and elderly population.
In efforts to curb the impending population decline, which severely affects the Chinese military and economy, the military urged soldiers in 2023 to “procreate” by announcing an executive order on family planning.
To populate China’s workforce and military, the preference for boy children among Chinese couples is logical. Such preference is especially fueled by China’s historically patriarchal and increasingly militaristic culture.
This means that China’s unnatural gender disparity has been achieved through sex-selective abortion, a conclusion also supported by the United Nations.
While unfortunate and devastating phenomena in a communist country may not surprise many Americans, we often don’t realize that in some parts of our nation, we are not far from such liberalism.
Sex-selective abortion is a phenomenon occurring in the United States, as well. Moreover, it has a legal precedent.
In the Box v. Planned Parenthood of Indiana and Kentucky, Inc. Supreme Court case, laws banning abortions based solely on the baby’s gender, race, ethnicity, or detected disability were found unconstitutional.
While there have been further efforts to pass such bans, pro-choice American scholarship has defended the lack of these bans by accusing the anti-abortion side of exploiting the rights of Asian American pregnant women to access abortion.
No culture or race should have the right to kill their children, especially based on the unborn child’s gender.
Take for instance the state of New York, America’s second most leading abortion provider, where abortion is a constitutional right and no state law specifically bans sex-selective abortion.
The state also prides itself on being an abortion “safe-haven,” where women from all over the country — and apparently out of the country, too — seek abortions. In the decades following Roe v. Wade, reports of Canadian women seeking abortions in New York often went uncovered.
In New York, pregnant mothers can destroy their unborn children for any reason up to 24 weeks gestation, and for broad health reasons thereafter, including even pregnancy-related anxiety based on the ‘sex’ of their unborn child.
Under the Reproductive Health Act (RHA) and the recently enacted Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) to New York’s State Constitution, women and girls can abort healthy unborn children, capable of surviving outside their mother’s wombs, for sex-selective reasons.
This “mental health” reason for later-term abortions is emphasized and outlined in a 2019 letter from NY’s Attorney General to the state’s Department of Health.
Does the United States, often through New York state policies, really want to maintain an abortion reputation comparable to communist China?
America is doing a great injustice to pre-born girls by refusing to ban sex-selective abortions. This action stands in great opposition to the values America claims to hold dear — life, liberty, and equality. We are encouraging policies that are just as barbaric and misogynistic as those of the CCP. This must end.
Sarah Prentice is Deputy Outreach Coordinator at Feminists Choosing Life of New York, a state-wide human rights organization promoting pro-life feminism and the consistent life ethic.
