The deliberate extermination of the female of our species is not the stuff of some dystopian novel or epic film, it’s a fact. Imagine if 160 million women were wiped out in the United States. You can’t imagine it, because that’s more than the entire female population of the country. Yet in Asia alone, the combination of technology and economic development has resulted in 160 million missing girls!
Nobel Prize-winner, Amartya Sen, first noted this phenomenon in his 1990 essay, “More Than 100 Million Women Are Missing,” in the New York Review of Books. Although, as an economist, he was aware of the disequilibrium this would produce, he did not know the reason for the decline. Needless to say, demographers were caught flat-footed as they chanted the mantra of overpopulation. Anyone who pays attention will know that, especially in Europe and Japan, large-scale population decline is occurring just as American Enterprise Institute Senior Fellow Ben Wattenberg chronicles in Fewer: How the New Demography of Depopulation Will Shape Our Future (Ivan Dee, 2005).
Where did the girls go? Who is killing them? These are the questions answered in Mara Hvistendahl’s new study, Unnatural Selection: Choosing Boys Over Girls, and the Consequences of a World Full of Men (Public Affairs, 2011). As a Beijing-based science correspondent, Hvistendahl is well-equipped to analyze problem. Sadly, her political leanings sometimes taint her judgment, as when she worries more that the disaster she is describing may be used by pro-lifers to ban all abortions than she does that girl babies are being killed per se. If she cares about women and women’s bodies, she should care about the bodies of unborn females.
The chilling data she tracks were uncovered first by Christophe Guilmoto, a French demographer, who wrote his dissertation on the tiny state of Tamil Nadu in Southwestern India where the birthrate resembled the decline observed in Europe. What he found was not just that people were having fewer children; they were having fewer daughters. Through interviews with nurses and others he discovered that as late as the early 1990s villagers were occasionally killing their daughters—a practice seldom seen in the 20th century. The ones who weren’t killed often ended up in orphanages. That this was happening at the same time as the country was developing economically was counterintuitive. Nevertheless, the decline in females was observable.
The link to technology was alarming, for it meant that India’s skewed sex ratio at birth was an outgrowth of economic progress, not backward traditions. And India was hardly alone in recently developing a sex ratio imbalance. As he expanded his focus from fertility rates to sex ratio at birth, Guilmoto found that several other Asian countries exceeded the biological upper limit of 106 boys for every 100 girls. In the 1980s , South Korea, Taiwan, and parts of Singapore registered sex ratios at birth of above 109. China reported a sex ratio of 120. (Figures in both China and India have since risen to 112 in India and 121 in China). Human, Guilmoto realized, were engineering what he calls “rampant demographic masculinization”—a change with potentially grave effects for future generations. “It was very difficult,” he said, “not to see it as a revolution.” Within a few years, the revolution would spread to Western Asia and Western Europe.
Contrary to the received wisdom among social scientists, instead of leveling the playing field economic and technological development in these countries increased the disparities between boys and girls. Economic growth was supposed to mean more girls get educations, advance in the workplace, and enjoy improved healthcare, for instance. Instead, these developments resulted in fewer women per capita since parents were using ultrasound and other prenatal screening technologies as tools for aborting girl babies.
Compounding female homicide is the problem of “surplus men.” Where there are insufficient women to marry, men will either lead lonely lives or, as seems more often the case, will resort to sex trafficking, prostitution, and buying brides. Thus, Hvistendahl predicts that the gender imbalance will likely result in social vertigo.
And it won’t just be forlorn single men who will suffer in 2020s Asia and 2030s Eastern Europe. Other scholars have begun to calculate the impact tens of millions of surplus men will have on everything from healthcare to crime. Historically, societies in which men substantially outnumber women are not nice places to live. Often they are unstable. Sometimes they are violent.
A brilliant reporter, Hvistendahl tells the story from the perspective of those involved: the demographer, parent, economist, doctor, and imperialist; the student, doomsayer, geneticist, feminist, bride, prostitute, bachelor, world, and finally, the baby.
Her epilogue brings the story round to the United States where we have developed sex selection not only into a fine art, but a lucrative one at that.
Seventy percent of the patients who visit L.A.’s most notorious fertility clinic come for sex selection.“Be certain your next child will be the gender you’re hoping for,” promises the Fertility Institutes website. “No other method comes close . . . PGD offers virtually 100% accuracy.”
Right here in the land of the free and the home of the brave, just like much of the rest of the world, we are making being a girl a capital offense. And we’re not doing it in the dark, behind a curtain where no one can see. Our war on girls is right out in the open, as public as the latest in-flight airlines magazine or advertisement in a national newspaper. Our shamelessness is clear evidence that the culture has been given up “to a debased mind to do what ought not to be done” (Rom. 1:28 ESV). Perhaps Hvistendahl’s work will help open blind eyes to a catastrophe happening right in front God and the whole world.
great article!