Where the Girls Aren't

A UN agency contract researcher says the prevalence of abortion and infanticide targeting girls has caused a critical global gender imbalance--with a disparity of more than 200 million worldwide. According to his report, delivered to international health officials this past week, the girls are “missing” because of a practice he calls “gendercide.”

Swiss Ambassador Theodor Winkler, director of the Geneva Center for the Democratic Control of Armed Forces, said the number of women who die because of gender-related violence, deprivation, and discrimination is larger than the casualty toll in all the wars of the 20th century combined. The deeply rooted phenomenon of violence against women is “one of the great crimes of humanity,” he asserted.

The study he directed, a 335-page global investigation by 60 authors titled Women in an Insecure World, shows that sex-selection abortions and infanticides are the primary cause of this gross imbalance, which has also resulted in increasing problems with child abuse, sibling violence, spousal exploitation, and sex trafficking. “We are confronted with the slaughter of Eve, a systematic gendercide of tragic proportions.”

“There are dozens of ways women come to a grisly end,” Winkler argued. “Obviously, human rights and the legal protection of women is of crucial importance but it is only one component. There is also a cultural change that must operate… It starts in the womb. There are societies where male births are preferred, particularly if the number of births are limited. That's where abortion for gender reasons starts,” he said.

According to Winkler’s report, now being distributed to governments, academic institutions, and field health officials around the world, UN figures, World Heath Organization research, and government reports unanimously demonstrate that personal and family violence against women is among the leading causes of premature death internationally. “Abortion is now both a moral issue and a health issue--but in quite the opposite manner that abortion advocates have long argued.”