Rónán Mullen (Independent)

I move:

That Seanad Éireann, noting that:

- gendercide involves selective abortion, infanticide or fatal neglect of baby girls after birth;

- gendercide is one of the most horrific human rights abuses present in the world today and perhaps the most widespread form of violent anti-female discrimination;

- the scale of the problem has been comprehensively documented at UN level and in US Congressional reports as well as by reputable journalists in cover story articles in The Economist, Time and Newsweek, among others; and that

- opposition to gendercide unites people with significantly different perspectives on the issue of abortion generally;

calls on the Government to:

- bring diplomatic pressure to bear on the governments of various states, and in particular China and India, which either promote gendercide or tolerate the problem within their borders;

- raise the issue of gendercide at UN and EU level, with a view to proactively challenging states such as China and India to abandon coercive population limitation policies, to repeal laws that reinforce bias against baby girls, and to take steps to counter the negative cultural attitudes towards women that underpin and motivate the bias against baby girls, leading to gendercide; and

- ensure that recipients of Irish foreign aid do not promote gendercide.

It is my pleasure to propose this motion this afternoon. Cuirim fáilte roimh an Aire Stáit. I will take this opportunity also to welcome Ms Serrin Foster of the Feminists for Life organisation, who has done much good work in raising awareness of issues relating to the topic under discussion. I heard Ms Foster and Jill Filipovic on "Today with Pat Kenny" yesterday and I thought it was wonderful to see such a coming together of minds, with people making common cause despite major philosophical disagreement on the issue of abortion generally. Abortion is part of this issue, although by no means the whole of it.

We are here to talk about one of the most horrific human rights abuses in the world and perhaps the most widespread form of violent anti-female discrimination. It is called "gendercide", a term coined in the book of the same name by Mary Anne Warren in 1985. It involves selective abortion, infanticide or fatal neglect of baby girls after birth. The scale of the abuse has been comprehensively documented at UN level, in US Congressional reports and by reputable publications such as The Economist, Time and Newsweek. Only two weeks ago, the Council of Europe adopted a resolution condemning the most prevalent aspect of gendercide, that of sex-selective abortion.

In June this year a joint statement by the Office of the High Commission for Human Rights, the UNFPA, UNICEF, UN Women and the World Health Organisation condemned the practice of gender-based sex selection. They said, "Sex selection in favour of boys is a symptom of pervasive social, cultural, political and economic injustices against women, and a manifest violation of women's human rights." There is huge pressure on women to produce sons. The discovery of a female feutus can then lead to its abortion. Sex selection can also take place before a pregnancy is established or after the birth of a girl through childhood neglect or infanticide.

Some two decades ago the Harvard and Nobel prize winning economist Amartya Sen documented the scale of gendercide in an article entitled "More Than 100 million Women Are Missing." In a recently published book, Unnatural Selection, journalist Mara Hvistendahl, who is pro-choice on the question of abortion, demonstrated that the overwhelming reason for the increasingly large demographic disparity in the male-female birth ratio is sex selective abortion. She estimated the number of girls missing or dead to be 160 million and counting. She pointed out the ability of modern medicine to ascertain the unborn child's gender at an early stage has contributed hugely to the scale of gendercide.

Gendercide is motivated by economic and social factors leading to prejudice against baby girls. It is especially the case in countries which implement strict population control measures such as China. The lower social status of women and girls generally, combined with their perceived inability to contribute to the family's economic development, means that baby girls are valued less than baby boys. Gendercide is especially prevalent in India and China, which is why I have mentioned them specifically in the motion, but is increasingly an issue in parts of eastern Europe.

Opposition to gendercide tends to unite people with significantly different perspectives on abortion. Polls have shown that about 95% of the American people oppose sex selective abortion. Even those who are pro-choice generally agree that abortion should not be allowed when the explicit reason for it is the female gender of the unborn child. They recognise that it makes no sense to proclaim gender equality while at the same time permitting the direct targeting of an unborn child solely on account of her gender.

The scale of the problem is horrifyingly vast in north-west India and China where the practice is prevalent. These areas account for a large proportion of the 160 million so-called missing women in Asia. These missing women would be alive today if it were not for selective abortion, infanticide and economic discrimination. Selective abortion has become a major issue since the availability of ultrasound scans increased during the 1980s in these regions. In one hospital in Punjab in northern India the only girls born after a round of ultrasound scans were those who had been mistakenly identified as boys or those who had a male twin.

The normal sex ratio is between 103 to 106 to every 100 girls born, which is said to be biologically fixed. In China the ratio today is 123 boys per 100 girls, which has increased steadily over the past 25 years. Such a rate is biologically impossible without human intervention. In India the latest census reveals that there are 7.1 million fewer girls than boys under the age of seven. This statistic leaves the sex ratio for this age group at 914 girls to every 1,000 boys, the lowest rate since records began in 1961. If one compares the number of girls born to the number that would have been born under a normal ratio it indicates that 600,000 Indian girls go missing each year.

The growing gender gap will have major consequences for the coming generations. The horrifying social effects will become clearer as the large number of boys being born reach maturity. There is the obvious effect of a surplus of men who have no women to marry. The Chinese Academy of Social Sciences estimated that within ten years 25% of men in the country will be unable to find a bride. The figure is slightly lower in India but still high at 15% to 20%.

To put it into context, China will have 30 to 40 million more men under 19 years of age than women. This will be almost twice as many as the number of men this age in Europe's three largest countries combined and these men will have little prospect of marriage. Men unable to find brides seek sex and companionship in brothels and pay traffickers for abducted brides. Thousands of women have been smuggled into China from Vietnam to work as prostitutes or be sold into marriage. As the Colombia University economics professor Lena Edlund observed, the greatest danger associated with prenatal sex determination is the propagation of a female underclass.

A link has already been established between crime and an increased sex ratio in China. In the past 20 or so years as the ratio has increased, the crime rate has doubled. In India the best predictor of violence and crime in the area is not income but sex ratio. Another effect is the rise in suicide rates among women. China has one of the highest female suicide rates in the world and it is thought this can, in one way, be attributed to women living with the knowledge that they have aborted or killed their baby daughters, the view of the Chinese writer Xinran Xue who documented the problem in The Economist in March 2010.

Only two weeks ago the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe adopted a resolution and recommendation condemning the practice of sex selective abortions. The text of the resolution was drafted by Ms Doris Stump, a pro-choice Swiss Socialist MP, something the Government should note. Sex selective abortion is defined as "A new global trend due to the combination of the widespread use of abortion as a means of family planning and the widespread availability of prenatal sex determination technology."

In its resolution and recommendations the Parliamentary Assembly expressly condemned the practice of prenatal sex selection which is contrary to the core values upheld by the Council of Europe, such as equality and the dignity of human beings. It recalls the pressure placed on women not to pursue their pregnancies because of the sex of unborn children, that it is a form of psychological violence and the practice of forced abortions should be criminalised. As Ms Stump said, "In a number of countries which have legalised abortion this right is being misused in conjunction with the availability of prenatal sex identification to affect women's chances of being born."

The Government's amendment partially acknowledges the human rights abuses which necessitate the motion I tabled. However, in explicitly mentioning female infanticide it fails to mention the problem of sex selective and forced abortions. This is despite agreement among experts that sex selective and forced abortions comprise an overwhelming majority of the 160 million deaths attributable to gendercide. The Council of Europe, the UNFPA, the World Health Organisation, UNICEF and UN Women have all, in the past year, condemned sex selective abortions but there is no mention of the word in the Government's amendment.

The 1997 Oviedo Convention on human rights and biomedicine expressly forbids sex selective abortions. Why does the Government equivocate on this issue? Who could possibly support such a human rights violation? Does it do so in the name of gender equality? It would be outrageous if that was so.

The Government's counter motion also fails to mention the need to put pressure on India and China in regard to this problem. All the leading experts and international agencies accept China and India are disproportionately responsible for promoting or tolerating the human rights abuses under discussion here. I wonder if the Government is thinking of trade links when it should be thinking of human rights.

It may be argued that laws have been passed in India in the 1990s but they are more honoured in the breach than the observance. We need to raise this issue and the fact that Ireland is small is no reason for us not to take a strong moral stance. People often speak about not exporting our problems but we should never hesitate to export good ethics and the message about human rights in a consistent way.

This motion was a wonderful chance for the Government to formally condemn for the first time gendercide in all its guises, including those involving unborn baby girls. That the Government has failed to do so is a terrible shame and sends a very worrying message to the international community. It would be no argument to suggest this is a term that is not accepted. It has been around since 1985 and The Economist used it as a simple strap head in a cover story article on the topic as recently as March 2010.

It is quite clear what the Government should have done. It should have joined with me, Senators Van Turnhout, Crown and Quinn and Fianna Fáil and Sinn Féin Senators in recognising that this was a motion that was drafted and succeeds in uniting people who may have different perspectives on abortion but do not have different perspectives on the importance of human dignity, in particular female human dignity. People should not have different perspectives about any cultural practice or state toleration of practices which involve ending the lives of young girls. Whether it happens before birth through pre-natal diagnosis or a sex-selective abortion or after birth through female infanticide or by allowing girls to die, the same revulsion should unite us. It is not enough to fall in behind an ideology of choice but ignore its consequences in certain cases, especially with 160 million women gone from our world. It is a real missed opportunity that the Government could not go beyond a condemnation of female infanticide or identify this as a problem, particularly in China and India. Infanticide is becoming more of a problem in Caucasus countries such as Azerbaijan, Armenia and Georgia since the fall of communism.

For those of us who believe in the sanctity of all life, from conception to its natural end, this is a justice and human rights issue. For those of us who describe ourselves as pro-choice, we should have been able to unite with this motion under the heading of women's dignity, rights and welfare. For those of us concerned about economic stability and social cohesion, it should have been possible to unite behind this motion as well.

This is an issue with profound and far-reaching consequences for economies. In China, thousands of men, known as bare branches, are already becoming a social problem. Where people do not have the roots of family life and children, they wander and are a threat to stability and social order. In other parts of China, families with more than one child go from place to place like migrants to escape the population control authorities. This is the horrifying reality of what is happening in parts of our world. We should be united in naming this issue, condemning it and raising awareness of it in all relevant international fora.