Douthat vs. Hvistendahl on sex-selective abortion

Earlier this week, Ross Douthat wrote a column lamenting sex-selective abortion based on Mara Hvistendahl's new book, "Unnatural Selection: Choosing Boys Over Girls, and the Consequences of a World Full of Men."  He concluded:

[T]he 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 what’s implied on every page of “Unnatural Selection,” even if the author can’t quite bring herself around.

The tragedy of the world’s 160 million missing girls isn’t that they’re “missing.” The tragedy is that they’re dead.

Hvistendahl now responds, and wisely (in my view) points out that "[r]eproductive rights in the United States have been positioned around the notion of absolute choice, and facing advances in reproductive technology like early and easy sex determination involves addressing the question of whether there may in fact be some limits to the reach of choice."  Prochoice advocates have been unwilling to tackle that question, and thus prolife advocates have an advantage in the debate because sex-selective abortions are so morally troubling to most Americans.  But that's as far as the prolife advantage goes, according to Hvistendahl.  After all,

Women make the decision to abort because women know best how difficult it is to be female. Further reducing a woman's rights would only make her more wary of having a daughter.

Hmmm . . . we face a pressing problem of girls being targeted for abortion, but we should not use the law to curtail abortion rights because that will just make women more likely to target their daughters for abortion, knowing how much more difficult life will be without a robust set of abortion rights?  I agree that a person can oppose a right to sex-selective abortions without necessarily opposing a right to abortion more broadly, but Hvistendahl's logic is a bit of a stretch, it seems to me.