Michael Paulsen on Gender Selection Abortions

My colleague, Mike Paulsen, has posted a piece on the Public Discourse site, titled "It's a Girl."  Check  out the full article here.  Herewith a couple of excerpts:

Millions of women obtain abortions because they do not want baby girls.

It’s shocking, but incontrovertible. * * * In a recently published book, Unnatural Selection, journalist Mara Hvistendahl convincingly demonstrates that the overwhelming reason for the increasingly large demographic disparity in the male-female birth ratio is sex-selection abortion. Hvistendahl estimates the number of missing or dead now to be 160 million and counting. Women have abortions because (among other reasons) they are able to learn the sex of their unborn baby and kill her if she’s a girl.

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Being confronted with a harsh reality can change the minds of persons who have thought about a question only in abstract, arid terms. It is possible, then, that even a pro-abortion Court, confronted with a law banning sex-selection abortion, might recognize and retreat from the consequences of its own prior decisions. Enacting sex-selection bans, even if contrary to Roe and Casey, just might lead the Court to begin charting a path away from Roe.

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Not just pro-choice justices, but also pro-choice politicians need to be confronted with, and called to account for, the lethal logic and terrible consequences of their support of Roe. President Obama, and pro-choice members of Congress and state legislatures, should be put to a straightforward test: Do you support or oppose a right to abortion for reasons of sex-selection? Should a woman have a constitutional right to abortion because “it’s a girl”? There is no better litmus test issue over life, and there is no better time for pressing such a challenge than during an election year.