Up to 160 million women and girls are missing. They weren’t abducted by aliens. They didn’t vanish as part of some true-crime mystery. We know exactly what happened to them: they were aborted in the womb or killed shortly after birth.
Sex-selective abortion and infanticide are among the clearest examples of why the idea of inevitable, linear human progress is a fantasy. Technology has not made us more civilised; in many places, it has simply enabled societies to be ruthless in a more efficient manner. Abandoning girls, or babies with disabilities, to die was extremely common in the ancient and non-Christian worlds, and in many places it was never lost to the annals of history.
