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For International Women’s Day, Hillary Clinton recently spoke at the UN calling for a right to abortion and making development money contingent on abortion. She couched her “thin the herd” mentality as essential to both women’s progress and escape from poverty: “There is one lesson from the past, in particular, that we cannot afford to ignore: You cannot make progress on gender equality or broader human development, without safeguarding women’s reproductive health and rights. That is a bedrock truth.”
Is abortion our “one lesson?” Does abortion end poverty? Do those unplanned pregnancies get in the way of “gender equality” and “human development.” What about overpopulation? Whoa, you say, that’s serious. That’s one lesson, you say.
What has such a singular focus achieved? Feng Jianmei is one of an estimated 1.3 million women each year who are subjected to forced abortion in China, a terrible human rights abuse stemming from the one-solution mentality Clinton proposes.
By advancing abortion at the UN, Hillary Clinton throws her weight behind abortion as the one way to advance women’s rights and solve the world’s problems. Eliminating poverty is equated with eliminating the offspring of the poor, who are those most affected by China’s one-child policy. Yet abortion is nowhere proven to solve a single women’s health issue; in fact, it generates a myriad of problems. Can someone please ask the dour Neo-Malthusians who dominate in our college classrooms and politics to prove their claim of global overpopulation as distinguished from plain old overcrowding in urban areas? Studies of demographics actually suggest that a more accurate image than explosion would be implosion – a “demographic winter.”
