International Women’s Day

On this day designated by the United Nations to honor and protect the world’s women better than the world is currently doing, the Commission to Study Women meeting there for two weeks might take a serious look at an alarming report they’ve just received about missing women. 

The report addresses the situation of female children in various countries, and focuses particularly on the discrimination against them practised in many countries, including denial of the basic right to be born.

The report reveals that 100 million women are missing from today’s world as a result of selective abortion and female infanticide.  80 million of the missing women are due to selective abortions in India and China. And in other Asiatic countries such as Pakistan, Bangladesh, Taiwan, South Korea, Indonesia, Vietnam and the Caucasus (Azerbaijan, Georgia and Armenia) female infanticide is giving way to selective abortion. 

Since these countries contain half of the world’s population (3,000 of the 6,500 million inhabitants), these practices have caused gender imbalance at a global level. The consequences of this are not only the creation of “bachelor villages” in India, or the lack of young women to marry in China, says the report, but also the increase in violence, alcoholism, drug addiction and depression, in addition to an alarming increase in rape and trafficking of women at a national and international level.

These aren’t the ripple effects of abortion and female infanticide. It’s more like tsunami devastation. The Institute for Family Policy (IPF) and 18 other organizations around the world compiled this critical report.

Lola Velarde, President of the European IPF Network, says “the phenomenon of selective abortion is becoming a new, more silent version of female infanticide, by which female children are denied their most basic of rights, the right to be born, and is also a phenomenon linked to the most unfair gender-based discrimination”.

Aren’t feminists concerned about this? Some sure are.