Ran across this article on feminism's legacy via ifeminists.
I've always thought that the saddest legacy of the rise of radical feminism is the way abortion has been used to reduce the number of girls born in third world countries. It's just mind-boggling to me that advocating for women to "have control over their bodies" has led to sex selection abortions that have cost the lives of literally millions of women.
Feminists like to blame this rapidly-worsening situation on “patriarchy,” but that has been around for thousands of years and is less powerful today than ever before. What is new, is the access to abortion in so many places. And this has long been a paramount goal of feminists: To grant the “right to control her own body” to each woman on Earth via unrestricted abortion. That, combined with falling prices for the ultrasound machines that can reveal an unborn child’s sex, has produced the disastrous situation that the Asian world is in now.
And just how, exactly, are men on the whole supposed to benefit from being unable to find wives? By 2020, 30 million Chinese men of marriageable age are expected to be in that situation because of 30 million “missing” young women. Many historians warn that a large number of unmarried men in a society is a recipe for social unrest and war. The kidnapping of women for forced marriage and prostitution is already increasing exponentially in Asia. This is a disaster for both sexes and society as a whole.
The great experiment of feminism, just 40 years or so old as a social force, has produced this wonder: The ever-growing elimination of more and more girls worldwide. And so far, nothing can stop it. Indeed, from the feminist perspective, how or why should it be stopped? If women have a right to an abortion, why can they not exercise it on the basis of sex selection? Is the abortion her choice, or the government’s?
I rarely see feminists discuss sex selection abortions. Indeed, it's difficult to square one's "right to choose" mantra with women who choose to abort their female babies. The argument usually turns on the idea that these women don't really choose to kill their female babies but are forced to do so because of the "patriarchy." But as the author points out, in cultures like China, where the son takes care of the parents in their old age and a woman marries into a man's family (thus abandoning her own), women are freely choosing to kill their female babies because they are simply less valuable.
If the right to choose trumps all (including logical ideas like parental consent and notification), then why would feminists decry sex selection abortions? It's still a woman's body, right?
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