A Roman soldier wrote the following in a letter to his wife over 2,000 years ago: “If you bear a child and it is male, let it be; if it is female, cast it out.”

The jarring statement appears in a casual letter home, highlighting its cold brutality. This was what it was like to live in a society that did not value human life and chose to see women as less valuable than men.  

If the same statement was uttered today, it would surely be met with shock, horror, and outrage. Right?

Perhaps not as much as we might hope.

In fact, something just as terrible is happening today. Rather than babies being left to the elements as they were in ancient Rome, they die of dismemberment and other awful deaths under the guise of “healthcare.” And like in ancient Rome, there is evidence that many of these murders are motivated by a bias against girls. According to recent research, the world is missing an estimated 23 million baby girls right now due to sex-selective abortion.

Abortion activists claim to promote women’s rights while enabling one of the most horrific manifestations of misogyny—the killing of an unborn baby simply because she is a girl. 

When Planned Parenthood and their allies celebrated Women’s Equality Day with the hashtag #BansOffMyBody, did they give any thought to the bodies of the little girls they dismember? Where is the equality for the millions of baby girls who are not even given the chance to live outside of the womb because they were the incorrect sex?

 In nations where the global community has expressed concern about injustice toward women, organizations such as the UN decry sex-selective abortion as sexist. In the US, however, the UN refers to recent measures to prevent abortion in the US, including Missouri’s ban on sex-selective abortion, as a form of “gender-based violence.” How is it gender-based violence to ban something that, in another country, is a form of sexism? (Paradoxically, the UN also calls abortion a “human right,” even though they acknowledge its role in gender-discrimination.)

Similarly, the Guttmacher Institute recognizes that sex-selective abortions contribute to skewed sex ratios due to son-preference, but argues that banning sex-selective abortion is unreasonable. They even go so far as to say that bans on sex-selective abortion on sex-selective abortion in the United States are discriminatory.

While we would like to tell ourselves that the United States is far too advanced for such discrimination to be taking place, evidence indicates that it is in fact happening here as well. That the number of sex-selective abortions in the U.S. is lower than in some countries is not a good reason to say that we should not be concerned. Killing an unborn child because it is the wrong gender is wrong, whether it is one child or a million. 

Furthermore, there are currently only 12 states have passed bans preventing sex-based abortions, and only eight of those bans are in effect, though Missouri will soon make a ninth as earlier this week a federal appeals court upheld a statewide ban on abortions based on sex, race, or disability. In May, the Supreme Court declined to take a case challenging a lower court ruling that struck down a similar ban in Indiana. In other words, the United States has a long way to go in preventing sex-based abortions.

As Anna Higgins at the Lozier Institute pointed out,

If discrimination against a girl or boy on the basis of sex after he or she is born is prohibited, why then do we refuse to enact laws that protect those same children from lethal sex-discrimination prior to birth? We have thus far done a disservice to women and society as a whole by refusing to educate our citizenry on the importance of equality under the law in every instance of sex discrimination – including prenatal sex discrimination.

It is impossible, when faced with the deaths of 23 million girls, to argue that abortion is somehow a means of valuing or protecting women and girls. When it comes down to it, the abortion industry is a profit-driven attack on humanity, especially women, that masquerades as a champion of women’s rights. Let’s not allow this lie to go unchallenged.