Carrie Buck was involuntarily institutionalized by her foster parents in order to cover up that her pregnancy was caused by their nephew’s raping her. Cohen tells her story sympathetically in the context of the America eugenics movement and the powerful men who were seeking to have thousands of people involuntarily sterilized. The Buck v. Bell decision has never been overturned, but the view of it as an embarrassment and horror story is currently widespread – as seen by this book and its reviews. Lessons applying to dealing with poverty and racism are obvious to all, and lessons applying to the social dynamics of dealing with Roe v. Wade are obvious to us.

This is a major international problem: the catastrophic disappearance of girls and women caused by sex-selection abortion. In this book, Hvistendahl (who takes the “pro-choice” view) notes that many parents use technology to determine sex before birth and abort the girls – roughly 160 million unborn girls have been destroyed this way. In several countries, the birth ratio is around 900 girls to 1,000 boys. Ross Douthat, commenting on the book, points out that “Western governments and philanthropic institutions have their fingerprints all over the story of the world’s missing women. From the 1950s onward, Asian countries that legalized and then promoted abortion did so with vocal, deep-pocketed American support. Digging into the archives of groups like the Rockefeller Foundation and the International Planned Parenthood Federation, Hvistendahl depicts an unlikely alliance between Republican cold warriors worried that population growth would fuel the spread of Communism and left-wing scientists and activists who believed that abortion was necessary . . . For many of these anti-population campaigners, sex selection was a feature rather than a bug, since a society with fewer girls was guaranteed to reproduce itself at lower rates. . . [The victim is] society at large, [Hvistendahl] argues, citing evidence that gender-imbalanced countries tend to be violent and unstable. It’s the women in those countries, she adds, pointing out that skewed sex ratios are associated with increased prostitution and sex trafficking. These are important points. But the sense of outrage that pervades her story seems to have been inspired by the missing girls themselves, not the consequences of their absence. Here the anti-abortion side has it easier. We can say outright . . . The tragedy of the world’s 160 million missing girls isn’t that they’re ‘missing.’ The tragedy is that they’re dead.”

The Center for Global Non-Killing offers an extensive list of books that looks at “non-killing” through various disciplines and in various languages. All are available as pdfs on the web in addition to paperbacks. The volumes on Nonkilling Psychology and one of the two chapters on psychology in Toward a Nonkilling Paradigm are written by Rachel MacNair and so directly cover all consistent-life concerns.