The United Nations Development Program (UNDP) has stated the obvious in a new report finding that millions of women are “disappearing” because of sex-selective abortions in developing countries in Asia.
The report, entitled “Power, Voice, and Rights: A Turning Point for Gender Equality in Asia and the Pacific”, decries “gender inequality” in East Asia where it is estimated that there are 119 baby boys born for every 100 baby girls.
Here are the report’s findings about abortion:
• “Females cannot take survival for granted,” the report says on page 42. “Asia has the highest male-female sex ratio at birth in the world, with sex-selective abortion and infanticide leaving approximately 96 million missing women in seven countries. In most regions, women comprise 51% of the population, but only 49% in Asia-Pacific.”
• “The problem of ‘missing girls’ – in which more boys are born than girls, as girl fetuses are presumably aborted, and women die from health and nutrition neglect – is actually growing,” a UNDP summary of the report says.
• The summary continues, “China and India together account for more than 85 million of the nearly 100 million ‘missing’ women estimated to have died from discriminatory treatment in health care, nutrition access or pure neglect – or because they were never born in the first place.”
• While the world average for the life expectancy of women is 1.06 years longer than that of men, Asia’s ratio of female-to-male life expectancy is below this average. “This discrepancy stems from a lifetime of gender discrimination, starting from the deliberate abortion of female fetuses.”
The report goes even further, calling for “strict actions against sex-selective abortions…to balance the sex ratio at birth in many countries in the region, specifically those with alarmingly high male-over-female ratios at birth, such as China and India.” It calls for health professionals and the media to “act as watchdogs and influencers of attitudes” in countries where sex-selective abortions are illegal but the law is not effectively implemented. It also recommends that governments offer “incentives for girl children”.
It baffles me that the UN is surprised at this when they spend so much time promoting abortion around the world. The United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) is specifically dedicated to “reproductive health” and is actually involved in the one-child policy of China that causes the very gender inequality they condemn!
The ignorance and hypocrisy of the UN is appalling. When will they wake up to the fact that abortion destroys lives and societies, causing many of the problems they try to fight?
To view the full 255-page, 14 MB report, click here. Abortion is mentioned on pages 22, 42, 75, 92, 142, 157, and 174.
To view the four-page UNDP summary, click here.
