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FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: March 8, 2017
Contact: Mallory Quigley, [email protected],  202-223-8073

Susan B. Anthony List President Marjorie Dannenfelser offered the following comment this morning:

“Consider the cruel irony of today’s strike:  the lives of millions of women have ended in the womb because of abortion, and millions more mothers have been wounded by a predatory abortion industry. Strike organizers miss the mark when they fail to stand up for the smallest and most vulnerable of our sisters. When they promote a pro-abortion agenda, they confound freedom for women. They inconvenience and exclude women who want to protect unborn children under the law.  They ignore women who need love and practical assistance, not abortion. 

“Modern history makes clear that denying the right to life of babies in the womb inflicts lethal harms on the unborn, disproportionately women, and on their mothers, who are sometimes subjected to forced abortion. The harm of ignoring the right to life, including that of the female unborn child, ramifies throughout society for decades. To show the impact women have on our economy, organizers have called on women to refrain from working or shopping today. But the impact of this strike pales in comparison to the impact of the perpetual absence of more than 25 million women missing in the United States since 1973, and more than 500 million worldwide in the last century. These women are not just missing one day of work, but an entire lifetime of contributions to the public good, due to abortion.”

Rather than a Day Without a Woman, we envision a Lifetime without Women Victims of Abortion. Below are the facts we urge you to consider today as you write on the women’s strike.

Impact of Sex-Selection in the U.S. and Abroad

• Sex-selective abortion is a well-known problem in China and India, where a cultural preference for sons, coupled with political and economic influences, has severely skewed sex ratios at birth (SRBs).  From what demographer Nicolas Eberstadt has called the “initial signal” in China (“The Global War Against Baby Girls,” The New Atlantis), skewed SRBs have appeared in dozens of countries worldwide, from Southeast Asia to the Caucasus and the Western Balkans (The Economist, “The Worldwide War on Baby Girls, 2010).  
  • Instances of sex discrimination perpetrated via abortion and infanticide are well documented and have resulted in millions of “missing” girls in some societies.[1] 
  • In China, for example, men outnumber women to the tune of 33 million.[2] “More than 20 years ago, Amartya Sen (1990) documented that 100 million girls and women were “missing” from the global population as a consequence of neglect, infanticide, and inequalities in care. The figure is now estimated to be in excess of 160 million, with sex-selective abortion playing a major role (Hvistendahl 2011).”[3] 
  • Such practices constitute a real “war on women” and have been widely condemned.[4] 
  • Those who claim to be concerned with women’s rights can no longer ignore the need to ban sex-selective abortion in order to protect girls from “gendercide.”
    (Anna Higgins, “Sex Selection Abortion: The Real War on Women,” (Charlotte Lozier Institute, April 13, 2016)
• Only eight U.S. states outlaw sex selection via abortion despite evidence of the abortion industry’s unwillingness to meet the issue head on.
• Selecting females for abortion may have deep cultural roots, but it has also been a purposeful policy of Western population control groups who capitalized on the long-term impact of reducing the number of women on the planet.  As Ross Douthat explains, discussing Mara Hvistendahl’s book Unnatural Selection: Choosing Boys Over Girls and the Consequences of a World Full of Men, “For many of these antipopulation campaigners, sex selection was a feature rather than a bug, since a society with fewer girls was guaranteed to reproduce itself at lower rates.”

Key Quotations

• “If 163 million women were missing from the US population, you would certainly notice—but only if you were a man. That’s because there would be no women left. Imagine the nation’s malls and supermarkets, its highways and hospitals, its boardrooms and classrooms exclusively filled with men. Imagine the bus or the subway or the car that takes you to work, then erase the females commuting alongside you. Erase your wife and your daughter. If you are a woman reading this, erase yourself.” Mara Hvistendahl, Unnatural Selection
• “Our challenge is to turn the clock forward by offering women new visions that do not pit their lives against the lives of their children in a Darwinian struggle for survival.   In that struggle, no one wins.” Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, The Cost of Choice: Women Evaluate the Impact of Abortion.
• “As I became more and more immersed in the problems of the poor, especially poor women, I grew more and more disgusted with the argument put forward by abortion advocates that the availability of abortion would assist poor women on the road out of poverty.  The thought that we, as a nation, would attempt to solve the problems of the poor by helping them rid themselves of their own children haunted me.”  Erika Bachiochi, Ibid.

Susan B. Anthony List and its connected super PAC, Women Speak Out spent more than $18 million in the 2016 election cycle, knocking on more than 1.1 million doors in battleground states to defeat Hillary Clinton and maintain a pro-life Senate. SBA List is dedicated to pursuing policies and electing candidates who will reduce and ultimately end abortion. To that end, the SBA List emphasizes the education, promotion, mobilization, and election of pro-life women.  The SBA List is a network of more than 465,000 pro-life Americans nationwide.

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