Mara Hvistendahl is worried about girls. Not in any political, moral or cultural sense but as an existential matter. She is right to be. In China, India and numerous other countries (both developing and developed), there are many more men than women, the result of systematic campaigns against baby girls. In “Unnatural Selection,” Ms. Hvistendahl reports on this gender imbalance: what it is, how it came to be and what it means for the future.
In nature, 105 boys are born for every 100 girls. This ratio is biologically ironclad. Between 104 and 106 is the normal range, and that’s as far as the natural window goes. Any other number is the result of unnatural events.
Yet today in India there are 112 boys born for every 100 girls. In China, the number is 121””though plenty of Chinese towns are over the 150 mark. China’s and India’s populations are mammoth enough that their outlying sex ratios have skewed the global average to a biologically impossible 107. But the imbalance is not only in Asia. Azerbaijan stands at 115, Georgia at 118 and Armenia at 120.
What is causing the skewed ratio: abortion…
A most thought-provoking article, which rightly, at the end, says that almost despite herself, the author of the book being reviewed has raised questions about the terrible implications of ‘choice’. Clearly (and ironically) free choice on abortion leads to a war on women via female babies in the womb. Just as it will lead to fewer black babies in the US and the UK, as poorer women choose to terminate a pregnancy.
The review article also made me reflect on the utter useless of the phrase Christian right and indeed of left/right labels generally. Because anti-abortion stands are association with ‘the Christian right’ those who do not self-define in this way hesitate to oppose abortion, not wanting to keep company with those terrible Christian reactionaries. But let me offer you this scenario: supposing, just supposing, homosexuality was traceable, after all, to a gene. Many parents would think, no, we want grandchildren, and would choose to end the pregnancy. Who then would be defending the rights of gay people to exist? It would be of course those terrible Christians. It seems to me more and more that we need to reject those ‘right-wing’ labels and insist that you do not have to be a conservative to oppose abortion: simply someone who defends human dignity.
This is what happens when you decide that you can end a baby’s life for a “good reason.” There are whole lots of possible “good reasons” for ending a baby’s life.
There’s actually a rather good “good reason” to prefer little boys to little girls in impoverished nations. For instance, boys support the old parents whereas girls find that rather challenging.
So really, abortion of girl babies in economically straightened cultures where one is not able to have scads of children serves to help the parents out . . . you know . . . rather like abortion over here in the US serves to help the parents out.
So it is not really a bad choice then. But I guess if you have the right to chose, good and bad have nothing to do with it.
“By Ms. Hvistendahl’s counting, there have been so many sex-selective abortions in the past three decades that 163 million girls, who by biological averages should have been born, are missing from the world”.
So the Nazis are bad, but this is not?
“One Indian abortionist tells Ms. Hvistendahl: “I have patients who come and say ‘I want to abort because if this baby is born it will be a Gemini, but I want a Libra.’ ”
I never cease to be amazed at how the human race can sicken me. Someday when we’re extinct, we’ll probably have no one to blame but ourselves–victims of our own sociopathy.