Breaking News: The Missing Girls Are All Dead

I couldn't believe my eyes when my copy of The Economist came in the mail last week! The cover of the left-leaning, European magazine featured a tiny pair of pink baby shoes on a stark black background with this bold headline: "Gendercide: What happened to 100 million baby girls?" Was this prominent, liberal magazine about to question the morality of abortion?

The cover story expresses grave concern that in nations like China and northern India, it is common for pregnant women to abort little girls. The authors cite three forces which have created the perfect storm for unborn baby girls: a) an ancient preference for boys; b) the desire for smaller families; and c) medical technologies which inexpensively identify the sex of an unborn child. For this reason, in places like China and India, only 100 girls are born for every 120 boys. The result is a growing epidemic of young men who resort to crime and bad behavior when they are unable to find wives and settle down. Meanwhile, women in those nations suffer from kidnapping and female trafficking, and even elevated suicide rates.

The editors confess their own bias in favor of abortion ("..safe, legal and rare.") But later they make this astonishing statement: "It is no exaggeration to call this gendercide." Any time a word ends with those four letters, it generally denotes murder. There's homicide, suicide, genocide, etc. etc. So is this well known, left leaning publication finally coming around to support the sanctity of life? Of course, not. Abortion is the holy grail of liberals in Europe and America. They could never cry out that we must stop this madness.

Instead they suggest attitude changes and better education. "All countries need to raise the value of girls," they opine. "The world needs to do more to prevent gendercide," they conclude.

In the Church, we abhor the destruction of all unborn human beings. This had been our unchanging position since the first century when followers of Jesus Christ became the first to denounce the abandonment and murder of unwanted infants- most commonly little girls. We have never felt inclined to elevate something as vague as "choice" above something as sacred as "human life." We have always known:

• It's irrational to use the term "gendercide" while insisting it's not really murder.
• It's hypocritical to argue that aborting unborn girls is unethical, while aborting unborn boys is perfectly acceptable.
• One of the most powerful steps any nation could take to "raise the value of girls" would be to treasure the unique role of women in bringing forth and nurturing human life. Any young adult can get a job or train for athletics, but only women can literally carry the next generation.

Those of us who follow Jesus Christ teach that men and women are different by design. Each sex has unique and extremely important contributions to make to our world. Our friends on the left insist that all people are just alike; that gender differences are the result of bias rather than birth. But the epidemic abortion rate against unborn girls tells us that most people know that's a lie. They cannot train little girls to be like little boys. It's tragic that they wish they could.

Little girls will never be safe in this evil world until nations re-learn two ancient truths. First, we must recognize that abortion is criminal because it destroys human life. And secondly, we must once again celebrate the ultimate value of the qualities most unique to women. Little girls are not valuable because they can be trained to compete with little boys. Even when they are not in the job market, they retain their most unique and empowering gift: birthing and nurturing the next generation.

Homicide and "gendercide" are what happens when we destroy unborn babies. And suicide is what happens when a nation values the workplace over the home.