“Better 500 rupees now than 5,000 rupees later.”

It sounds rather like a jingle for getting regular dental check-ups, or perhaps a tongue-in-cheek warning to drivers in the tight and crowded roads of Mumbai and Calcutta to avoid a bank-and-back-breaking collision.

But it’s not.

It’s an advert for abortion.

Pay 500 now, don’t pay 5,000 later on a dowry. Because in India, the traditional “bride-price” or dowry can cost a family’s full income of years, and in India, with the advent of the amnio, and then the ultrasound, more and more couples have elected to take the lives of their girl children than take the chance of poverty.

Since the late 1970’s, 163 million girls have been aborted by parents seeking a son.This is the ultimate discrimination. In India today the ratio between boy and girl births is somewhere around 112-115 boys to every 100 girls, and not only is this a sure path to racial suicide, it is a sure sign of the failure of so-called safe-legal abortion to be the saving-grace and equaliser to women.

For women in the womb, abortion is the first and final obstacle to their equality, their freedom, and their lives. For women and mothers, it is yet another pressure forced on them by society, another choice pre-made, another bar in the cage. Kill your daughters, girls, because there’s not enough to go around, and boys get first dibs.

This is the message we give women when we call abortion a natural choice, as if it were as unweighted and unworrisome as which dress to wear, which school to attend, which book or film to see or read. 

But it is not.

And this is not an issue relegated to India, or even to China—where women are not merely pressured financially and societally to abort daughters, but are forced to kill whichever child happens to be their second, and often choose to take the life of the first if it happens to be a girl. In the United States, President Obama recently refused to sign into law a bill banning abortion procedures performed on the basis of the sex of the child. Why?  Well, perhaps we simply don’t need such a law—after all, we’re quite enlightened here; who would kill a baby because she was a girl?

Lila Rose with the project Protect Our Girls recently went undercover to see just how easy it is to get an abortion on the basis of sex alone—even in states which have restrictions. Planned Parenthood was willing to abort a daughter any day of the week.

…quite enlightened. 

There is no reason whatsoever to allow this, nor any reason not to impose on a ban on killing girls because they’re girls. Nearly every Western nation, regardless of how broad their abortion laws are, has imposed bans on sex-selection abortion.

Abortion hurts women. It is a procedure that takes the life of a child, and it is one that is overwhelmingly and commonly used to subjugate women throughout the world—by not even allowing them to see the light of day. 

If you’re pro-life, pick up your rubbish, and get talking, acting, changing. Valuing the babies sends the same message to the mother, but support her as well. If you’re pro-choice, give these women a real choice—no girl should have her voice taken away because of her sex, and no woman should be told her daughter is less valuable than her son, and no mother has the right to abuse a daughter in favour of a son. Get shouting. Get moving. Give girls a chance.