A recent news story from the UK has drawn attention to sex-selective abortion.

The issue with sex-selective abortion comes from Asia where China’s one infant rule coupled with the traditional emphasis on sons and the general devaluation of women has created the practice of aborting girls—just girls—for decades. The same phenomenon has impacted India and other Asian countries. Morality aside, the practice has caused lopsided gender ratios posing an emerging demographic problem for the affected countries. The book Unnatural Selection by Mara Hvistendahl documents the issue in great detail. For a viewing audience, the documentary It’s a Girl also sheds light on global gendercide.  To illustrate the scale of the practice, Asia has lost, through sex-selective abortion alone, an estimate 160 million females—more than the population of women in America.

Knowing this, the UK has recently reemphasized their illegality of sex selective abortion by a vote in Parliament that had 181 keeping sex-selective abortion illegal to 1 against. I can only imagine that the one voter might have thought logically about the issue given abortion policy in the West.

What sort of law could the United States legislatures defend in a similar circumstance? By and large, the act of abortion is justified as a matter of personal, private choice. Progressives and the left have championed this stance for decades with the ululation that women have the right to choose what they do with their own bodies.

So let’s think this through: if abortion is to be legal under the premise of individual rights in the US, why should sex-selective abortion be illegal? If politicians cannot dictate what a woman does to her body, how can they dictate what to do if her body happens to be gestating a girl or a boy? If abortion is wrong, then it is wrong whether a boy or girl. If it is right, it is right whether a boy or girl. Indeed, in the language of the pro-choice crowd, it is neither male nor female nor person. It is void of such identities should consciences be marred with uncomfortable details.

I am somewhat amazed that the voting ratio was that one sided in the UK. It was purely political, since stating that it’s permissible to abort females is a political quagmire. But then again, aren’t all abortions sex-selective?