Amid the horror of state-mandated abortion, I find it difficult to find unmixed happiness over this particular change in policy. It smacks more of long-term necessity than of a genuine reaction against misogyny. Not that I don’t think it is fundamentally wrong to abort a child for reasons of gender selection; I certainly do. It is a somewhat positive step, tiny though it is, for the government to at least acknowledge that the practice is wrong. The elimination of misogyny cannot be legislated or legally enforced, however, especially in a nation in which it is officially considered necessary to abort children. How artificial to condemn gender-selected abortions of the first pregnancy as wrong, when abortion will be mandated for any subsequent pregnancies!

I believe it is a tragedy when any baby is aborted because it is not the firstborn, or because it is a girl, or for any reason at all. I acknowledge that there are occasional compelling reasons when abortion may be necessary, but I think it’s always tragic. I simply can’t rejoice much over 3,000 abortion prosecutions. That’s why I think so many anti-abortion efforts in the US are such terrible witnesses; the goal seems simply to be legislative and punitive. We, the church, have the unique solution to the problem of abortion: in the name of Jesus Christ, upholding all human life–created equal and sacred in the image of God–including those already born, to the point that the situations leading to abortions are eliminated. God can make that a reality, if we’d build bridges TO God instead of fencing people out FROM God. And I mean on an international scale, as well as locally.