Over the past few years, buried behind headlines about more exciting problems like global recessions, debt ceilings, and occupations of American urban centers, a debate from half the world away has been gaining steam. In China, sex-selective abortion—in which parents hoping for baby boys selectively abort baby girls—has slowly effected a seismic shift in the gender demographics of the most populous country on Earth. Worldwide, male births slightly outnumber female births by a ratio of about 105:100 (an imbalance rectified by the fact that men tend to get themselves killed more readily than women). But in China, the disparity is far greater: in some areas, boys outnumber girls upwards of 130 to 100. The reasons for this are myriad: China’s one-child policy, introduced in 1978 as a means of population control, bans many parents from having more than one child. Because culture and practical considerations—such as China’s patriarchalism and the expense of marrying off daughters—deincentivize having girls, many parents with only one shot at offspring opt to hold out for a boy, nixing the girls who happen to come along first.

As the phenomenon has gained traction, normally upstanding Western media have reacted strangely, achieving something between guarded concern and outright condemnation. The New York Times wrote in 2005 that the one-child policy has been “a human and public health disaster, with the large-scale abortion of female fetuses.” MSNBC reported that “millions of families [resort] to abortion” due to “China’s draconian one-child policy.” In 2009, the Economist, a decidedly sophisticated London-based global affairs journal, wrote about the “war on baby girls,” opining that “the cumulative consequence for societies of such individual actions is catastrophic” and that China needs “to stop the carnage.” The outrage has been so hot that journalists coined the term “gendercide.” (You know something’s important when new words are invented to describe it.)

Yet it’s curious, this outpouring of revulsion from the West’s brightest beacons for women’s choice, and it begs an important question: what’s all the fuss about? At these venerable institutions, on-demand abortion is thankfully a sacred right, up there with life, liberty, and the progressive tax system. The Times has long supported unfettered choice in terminating a pregnancy, recently expressing concern over a spate of pesky anti-abortion bills at the state level and optimism that President Obama “will nominate a warrior to the [Supreme Court],” meaning one who will uphold Roe v. Wade given the opportunity. Following Texas’s passage of a bill requiring abortion seekers to view a sonogram of the fetus first, MSNBC profiled a doctor in Round Rock, Texas, who chided Austin that “the last thing I need to be told from a Texas senator whose background is in, you know, talk radio, is how to perform my sonogram.” And the Economist has echoed the sentiments of former President Clinton, promoting abortion that is “safe, legal, and rare”—though when push comes to shove, as is sometimes the case, we understand that emphasis on the “legal” must trump the “rare.”

So enough of the griping. Truthfully, the criticism of China’s abortion practices by Westerners who champion our own is melodramatic. Proponents of free choice grasp that the primary concern in abortion is the rights of the mother. “Being pro-choice is trusting the individual to make the right decision for herself and her family,” Hillary Clinton explained as a Senate candidate in 1999. Planned Parenthood President Cecile Richards echoed the view in a recent Huffington Post article, reminding us that abortion is a vehicle to help “women determine their own future.” But don’t we know that enforcing a different ethic for our culture than for another is not only hypocritical, but supremely ethnocentric? You’d think these writers were conservatives. We recognize that women in the West who consider abortion often face a frightening alternative should they choose to have the child: financial hardship, unsupportive partners, embarrassment, family alienation. Yet few Westerners can grasp the plight of Chinese women, where girls are a dead weight around a family’s neck, often unable to go to college or earn an income, likely targets for domestic violence or sex traffickers, and where the inevitable dowry payment often sets parents back years if not decades. Who’s looking out for these women? Surely we wouldn’t deny them such a basic human right as abortion?

The problem is one with unwritten yet deeply held rules some marginal pro-choicers hold. In America, you’re allowed to have an abortion if the pregnancy is inconvenient or if you’re not ready for a child. But to abort because the baby is not what you hoped for is often considered eugenics, akin to the Nazis’ ethnic cleansing during the Holocaust. In July 2011, Psychology Today spotlighted an Asian doctor quietly protesting the practice. “He performs abortions himself,” the article reads. “For sex-selective abortions, however, he reserves a contempt bordering on fury. ‘You can choose whether to be a parent,’” the doctor is quoted as saying. “‘But once you choose to be a parent, you cannot choose whether it’s a boy or girl, black or white, tall or short.’” Even observing abortion-related realities is to risk being called a bigot. This winter, a pro-life group sparked an outrage in New York City by posting a billboard claiming blacks have a disproportionately high rate of abortion. Yes, the group was right: CDC stats indicate about half of black babies are aborted, far more than in any other racial group; and yes, the group was labeled insensitive and racist and the billboard taken down. But so what if it’s true? Maybe as a result, black women are happier than non-blacks. Was this backlash a primitive tinge guilt left over from less enlightened days, when women were denied the reproductive rights they deserved?

And why shouldn’t we be able to choose? After all, nobody’s disputing that women should be able to terminate their pregnancies. Certainly inconvenience, financial problems, and a perception of unreadiness to be a parent are legitimate reasons to dispatch a kid. And should you actually want to keep one, the scope of your decision-making is wide open. You can choose its name and to some extent its birthdate. You can smoke, drink, or run marathons while pregnant, all of which will dramatically shape the child’s health. You can test for and treat birth defects and diseases—or, if you prefer, create them, like a deaf lesbian couple tried to do back in 2002. And now, thanks to the miracle of genetic technology, cash-flush moms can fully design their own offspring, from gender to hair color and eye color. If we can engineer the kind of baby we have, or we can choose not to keep one in the first place, what’s wrong with opting for the latter if the prospective tot isn’t up to snuff?

In any case, it will be intriguing to watch the fallout unfold from China’s systematic culling of its unborn ranks, but one thing is certain: the trend doesn’t show many signs of slowing. And that’s for the better. If we are to truly become a world where women are rulers of their own bodies free from the intrusive hand of government, mothers-to-be must be free to abort for all reasons: race, ethnic makeup, nationality, birth defects both real and potential, inconvenience, financial distress, embarrassment, a general distaste for the process of childbirth, and certainly gender. After all, it’s not really baby girls that China’s aborting. They’re only fetuses.

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