Kosher, of course, means “ritually fit,” and we devote one issue a year to that which is fit not only ritually, but ethically. Enjoy this week’s Kosher Living section, which, besides its focus on kosher food, highlights the twists and turns of the high Jewish value of saving a human life, as well as other commandments of the Torah. Sometimes, “kosher” is used idiomatically, meaning “appropriate” or “right.” While turning their heads, though not in shame, millions of people around the world are engaged in, we might idiomatically and sarcastically note, “kosher genocide.”
“Gendercide,” Mary Anne Warren called it in her 1985 book with that title. The facts are clear: In many countries around the world — led by the globe’s worst offender of human rights, China — baby girls are aborted (mostly) or murdered (less often), with the same results: a drastic overbalance of males in the population. For example, in China today, there are 124 males for every 100 females. Translation: Marriage and family will be denied to a hefty portion of the males in Chinese society.
Millions of rootless young males (“bare branches,” as they are called in China) add up to catastrophic consequences, as the Economist points out. The results are not hard to predict: lack of societal buy-in; a growth in disaffection, frustration, crime and terrorism.
Radical population imbalance is is not just in China. India, Taiwan, Singapore, the Western Balkans and many other countries, both rich and poor, both educated and illiterate, engage in kosher genocide. “Gendercide” is practiced by Hindu, Muslim, Confucian and Christian societies alike. Gendercide is spreading around the world.
This is a great paradox. The male child is valued; the female is not. Yet, by killing some 100 million girls worldwide, an increasingly large percentage of males are condemned to grow up unvalued in the extreme, denied marriage and family.
The Economist, predictably, assigns the causes of radical population imbalance to cultural factors and to technology. The technology is the widespread use of ultrasound to identify a fetus’ gender. This makes it easy to decide on an abortion, given the cultural factors. These are the widespread devaluation of females, as tied to the preference for small families.
In the context of tenacious, indeed fanatical gender preference, the small family becomes deadly. Parents engage in gender selection via abortion to keep their families small. Female fetuses are aborted to arrive at a single male child. At best, after one male is born, one more child will be accepted.The preference for a small family, together with gender-selection abortion, renders it impossible for older sisters to be born or for more than one younger sister to be born.
There is a legitimate and central place for these cultural and technological factors in the demographic analysis. But they overlook the primary factor: the acceptability of abortion (which, in many countries, also smooths the way for female infanticide). What Bill Clinton famously said is stupendously fallacious. He said that abortion should be “safe, legal and rare.” However, once abortion is safe and legal, it is never rare. Once the permission is given to dispose of a fetus, it will inevitably lead to mass disposal, including, among the lethal consequences, gendercide.
Abortion on demand in this country is legal on the grounds that its justification exists as a “penumbra” in the US Constitution. Everyone knows — those for abortion and those against, and even the justices who ruled on Roe v. Wade, both for and against —that a right of privacy in a “penumbra” in the Constitution is but a convenient rationalization for a preferred social value and practice. (This debasement of the judicial process is what influences many to regard Halachah merely as a human preference, but that is another story.)
Under the real meaning of kosher, the Torah’s meaning, there is no right of privacy regarding the right of an individual and of a fetus to life. The Torah’s rare permit of an abortion itself requires the participation of, minimally, woman, rabbi, doctor and medical staff — hardly a private scenario. The Torah’s rare permit of an abortion does not sacrifice the sanctity of life as the fetus “pursues the life of the mother.” Quite the contrary. But because abortion on demand does sacrifice the sanctity of life, logical and lethal consequences follow. Gendercide is the worst. Gendercide is a telling example of why the values and rulings of the Torah should not be tampered with.
When they are, the result is not only, as in this country, “merely” the loss of countless millions of lives, but, as in China and many other parts of the world, the imperiling of the very stability of society.
| Comments |
|