False Choice Between Development and Daughters, The

Human Life Review, Summer 2007 by Yoshihara, Susan

Left unchecked, the next victims of the trend will be Africa's baby girls. With all the other evils facing them, so far they have largely avoided the deadly violence of sex selection due to that region's relatively high fertility rates. International organizations like UNFPA are engaging in a full-court press to increase contraceptive prevalence in Africa (now the world's lowest at 27%) and to liberalize abortion laws by several means, including a controversial continent-wide framework called the Maputo Plan of Action. Despite the fanfare given it by supporters like UNFPA, it has so far failed to gain official support from AU governments.

Here is the bottom line. Through their various mandates and mindsets, international institutions have put families and poor countries on the horns of a deadly dilemma: They can have social and political progress or they can have more than one or two children. Rights and development are pitted against faith and human life-increasingly, female life. It is a dark choice for any family, and it is a false choice.

With international financial and political institutions, global health and welfare organizations, and even human rights institutions stacking the deck against baby girls, is there any hope that we can help put a stop to the spreading global trend of sex-selective abortion? There have been hopeful signs.

For the first time, in March 2007, the U.N. body charged with looking out for women, CSW, made mention, even if only a passing mention, of the "root causes of son preference" and "female infanticide and pre-natal sex selection." While other U.N. bodies had condemned sex-selective abortion and infanticide for decades, the women's body remained silent due to the heavy influence of pro-abortion feminists on Western delegations, primarily from the E.U. Indeed, the 2007 CSW statement conspicuously leaves out any use of the word abortion.

At the same CSW meeting, however, several women's groups with diverse political perspectives spoke out to demand U.N. action. The fact that each group came to New York virtually unaware of the others may give us hope of springtime in the international women's agenda. This would only be fitting. The availability-and expectation-of abortion has made killing baby girls, once left to the hands of family and midwives, increasingly the responsibility of mothers.

In her letter to the 1995 Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing, Mother Teresa wrote: "That special power of loving that belongs to a woman is seen most clearly when she becomes a mother. Motherhood is a gift of God to women." The present crisis alerts us to a global double devaluation of motherhood-our motherhood and our daughters'.

In the same letter to the Beijing delegates, Mother Teresa said: "God told us, 'Love your neighbor as yourself.' So first I must love myself rightly, and then love my neighbor like that." Unwillingness to bring a girl into the world is a tragic indicator of the way a growing number of women see their own plight. It reflects the declining status of women-certainly not their empowerment. After so many years of international development and human rights, and in a world where so many can have so much, surely we should not have to choose between development and daughters.