Julie Bentley

When the leader of Britain’s oldest pro-abortion group, the Family Planning Association, admits she is “struggling” with the issue of sex-selective abortion, it is a rare admission by a self-described “pro-choice feminist” that aborting children because they are female is an almost intolerable dilemma.

Julie Bentley, as is required by pro-abortionists, denounces the investigative reporting by the Daily Telegraph which found that abortion clinics were willing to abort on the basis of the baby’s sex without a second thought. Clinicians admitted they were prepared to falsify paperwork to arrange the abortions even though it is illegal to conduct such ‘sex-selection’ procedures. Without getting into the substance of the findings, Bentley writes of the “hysterical demonization of abortion professionals.”

Bentley, between the lines, also concedes that there are virtually no limitations under the 1967 Abortion Act. Strangely, she tells us that “Abortion is a red herring,” presumably because women can abort for any reason or no reason. Bentley then gets to the nub of her column: “We should be asking ourselves, why? Why are women requesting to abort female foetuses?”

She understands and recites the historical and cultural reasons before pondering what (for pro-abortion feminists) is the imponderable:

On the one hand, a woman may well be facing familial pressure to abort a female, so shouldn’t “pro-choice feminists” get out of the way so she can get a “safe, legal abortion?”

On the other hand, Bentley writes, if “pro-choice feminists” accept sex-selection abortion ”are we also indirectly colluding with unacceptable discrimination? And therefore, allowing it to go on unchallenged for generations to come”?

At the end of her column, Bentley tells her readers, “I don’t think there are simple answers to dilemmas of this complexity.” This reminds us of what she said at the beginning: that asking this question “doesn’t make me a hypocrite or water down my pro-choice values. But it does mean I’m asking myself some really difficult questions.”

Anthony Ozimic of the Society for the Protection of Unborn Children (SPUC) may have put it best when he said, “Ms. Bentley’s admission proves that the pro-abortion lobby has no convincing answers to the scandal of sex-selective abortion.”

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Noemie Emery

I’ve tried—actually three times—to square pro-abortion feminists professed ideology with their nonchalant attitude toward sex-selective abortions which has resulted in the “loss” of 160 MILLION girls, according to journalist Mara Hvistendahl in her book “Unnatural Selection: Choosing Boys Over Girls, and the Consequences of a World Full of Men.” (See “Selected out of Existence”)

Perhaps I should have waited for “For liberals, some womens’ choices more equal than others,” written by Noemie Emery which appeared this week in the Washington Examiner. Talk about connecting ALL the dots.

She begins with almost an aside– that the “outspoken women” pro-abortion feminists say they want increasingly turn out to be pro-life women. Emery then does a wonderful job explaining how when the concept of “choice” emerged, it “seemed a triumph of marketing, the way to appeal to the libertarian streak in the people, to neutralize the unpleasant fact of the issue with something that could be sold as a good.”

But lo and behold, there was a ticking time bomb, a “quandary” not clear at the time. “’Choice’ as a value meant that all choices were equal in terms of morality: not only the choice to give life or take it, but all the reasons for which the choice of abortion were made.” In a nutshell nothing could be said, no matter how hideous the reasoning or the outcome, because “All women’s choices were regarded as wise, since women had made them.” And in case anyone DID object, it was dismissed as “’insulting to women’” — and “no more damaging charge can be made.”

Now, all over the world, “choice” was being used to annihilate the very population it was supposed to liberate. Emery describes it as “the culling of females, because they are female, for no other discernible cause.”

Emery asks, “Is this a crime against which they will rally? Well, no. Why not?” Her answer is so telling I hope you will forgive me if I quote it in its entirety.

It’s a “choice” — and choices, of course, must never be questioned, no matter to what ends they lead. Late-term abortion? Terrific. Infant dismemberment? Hardly a problem. Sequential abortion? No problem there.

Abortion as a tool to dispose of unwanted girl children? Now, this is a problem, but liberals have surrendered the right and the standing to make moral judgments. They have found now a choice they despise, and they can’t rail against it. Who would listen to them holding forth on this issue?

What in the world would they say?

Ready to fight over a word, wink or whistle, they have no words at all for all those dead females. They are strangled and silenced by “choice.”

You can read Emery’s terrific column here.