Ross Douthat Blasphemes Moloch

...by pointing out a screamingly obvious fact in the pages of secular liberalism’s most sacred and holy word, the New York Times:

In 1990, the economist Amartya Sen published an essay in The New York Review of Books with a bombshell title: “More Than 100 Million Women Are Missing.”  His subject was the wildly off-kilter sex ratios in India, China and elsewhere in the developing world. To explain the numbers, Sen invoked the “neglect” of third-world women, citing disparities in health care, nutrition and education. He also noted that under China’s one-child policy, “some evidence exists of female infanticide.”     

The essay did not mention abortion.     

Twenty years later, the number of “missing” women has risen to more than 160 million, and a journalist named Mara Hvistendahl has given us a much more complete picture of what’s happened. Her book is called “Unnatural Selection: Choosing Boys Over Girls, and the Consequences of a World Full of Men.” As the title suggests, Hvistendahl argues that most of the missing females weren’t victims of neglect. They were selected out of existence, by ultrasound technology and second-trimester abortion.     

The spread of sex-selective abortion is often framed as a simple case of modern science being abused by patriarchal, misogynistic cultures.
Patriarchy is certainly part of the story, but as Hvistendahl points out, the reality is more complicated — and more depressing.     

Thus far, female empowerment often seems to have led to more sex selection, not less. In many communities, she writes, “women use their
increased autonomy to select for sons,” because male offspring bring higher social status. In countries like India, sex selection began in
“the urban, well-educated stratum of society,” before spreading down the income ladder.     

Moreover, Western governments and philanthropic institutions have their fingerprints all over the story of the world’s missing women.     

From the 1950s onward, Asian countries that legalized and then promoted abortion did so with vocal, deep-pocketed American support. Digging into the archives of groups like the Rockefeller Foundation and the International Planned Parenthood Federation, Hvistendahl depicts an unlikely alliance between Republican cold warriors worried that population growth would fuel the spread of Communism and left-wing
scientists and activists who believed that abortion was necessary for both “the needs of women” and “the future prosperity — or maybe survival — of mankind,” as the Planned Parenthood federation’s medical director put it in 1976.


There’s something here to offend the whole political spectrum.  For lefties and feminists, there’s the uncomfortable fact that the principal harvest of pro-abort feminism has been the mass and disproportionate death of female.  Watching the wine and cheese eaters in the Douthat’s comboxes attempting to avoid this literally bloody obvious fact is to gain a new appreciation for the capacity of the human mind to rationalize, distort, and pretzelize itself in the desperate attempt to justify the unjustifiable.  No matter how you slice it, Douthat’s point is clear: abortion spell the death of millions of girls (and an increasingly dangerous world of millions of male with no hope of marriage and a lot of discontent and testosterone-fueled anger and loneliness looking for somebody to take it out on).

Meanwhile, for righties, there’s the embarrrassing legacy of Country Club Republicans (still very much a force in some sectors of our political life) whose basic approach, as Douthat notes, was to cuddle up to population planners at Planned Parenthood and say to the non-white parts of the world, “Just enough of me, way too much of you.”  To be sure, since Reagan committed the GOP to yakking about being “prolife” in the late 70s, the party has talked a good game.  And there are numerous serious prolifers in the Republican base and even among elected officials who really do want to save unborn children.  But the proof, in the end, is in the pudding and for 30 years, beyond occasionally passing a couple of rules that brought the US up to sub-Carthaginian levels of respect for the unborn, the tacit agreement between pols left and right has been to more or less let the matter stay where it has been since 1973: with one of the most reckless pro-abortion regimes in the western world.  The Left (particularly under this Administration) pushes to make the regime still more liberal and to crush conscience clauses and the views of Catholics and other prolife Christians.  The Right yaks a bit and (at the grass roots level) pushes back to defend beleaguered prolifers.  But nationally, when the GOP gets power it does very little and gives us Blackmun (author of Roe), O’Connor, Souter, Kennedy (who gave us the “Mystery Clause” that reaffirmed and strengthened Roe), and Roberts (who assures us that Roe is “settled” law).  Republican Presidents phone it in on Roe v. Wade day.  Many Republican pols give the impression that they’d really rather the whole matter goes away.

That said, it is obvious that the real zeal for killing babies remains where it has been since the Democrats embraced abortion with a passion after Roe and began to purge from their ranks all who did not hold the faith of Moloch.  One by one, Democrats ranging from Ted Kennedy to Jesse Jackson to Al Gore replaced their hearts and minds (which had once talked about the dignity of the least of these) with tape players provided by Planned Parenthood.  By the 80s the Revolution was complete and the Democratic party was firmly on board with the murder of the unborn as a “fundamental human right.”

Now the chickens are beginning to come home to roost as the policies of the Planners bear fruit in a massive and growing imbalance between girls and boys.  it was perfectly predictable (as the stupid blunders of Our Natural Rulers and Masters typically are).  But predicting the disaster and stopping it are, as Cassandra will tell you, two different things.

This Administration, of course, will do nothing to alleviate the problem, given it blinkered and robotic devotion to the cult of Moloch.  But those who care about the unborn are not reduced to helplessness. Adoption of girls is one possibility (some are killed after birth in places like China).  Political action at the Congressional or state level is also possible.  And, of course, Catholics have one very counter-cultural option open to them that is not, so far, illegal: have more babies.