Current News
For quite some time, a culture of abortion and infanticide has caused China and northern India to experience unnaturally large numbers of boys. Unfortunately, the problem is getting worse. According to Nobel Laureate Amartya Sen, in 1990 there were already over 100 million missing women, who had been aborted, killed, or neglected to death as infants in China, South Asia, West Asia and North Africa.
On March 8, 2010, the UN came out with a report that Asia is "missing" about 96 million women - most of them in China and India - who died from discriminatory health care and neglect, or who were never born at all. Female infanticide and sex-selection abortion have caused a severe gender imbalance in Asia, and the problem is worsening despite rapid economic growth in the region, the United Nations Development Program (UNDP) report said.
In the natural order of things, boys are slightly more likely to die in infancy than girls. On the other hand, nature seems to even this out by a slightly greater number of male conceptions, leading to an equal number of young men and women at puberty. In all societies that record births, between 103 and 106 boys are normally born for every 100 girls.
That order has changed fundamentally in the past 25 years. In China the sex ratio for the generation born between 1985 and 1989 was 108, already just outside the natural range. For the generation born in 2000-04, it was 124 (that is, 124 boys were born in those years for every 100 girls). The ratio today is 123 boys per 100 girls.
In March, both The Economist and The Christian Science Monitor published extensive articles on this issue. As The Economist points out, this mass destruction of girls has left a systemic gender imbalance in the population where there are more unmarried young men in China than the entire population of young men in America. The Economist, as its name suggests, looks at the world through the unsentimental lens of economic realities. And though it supports legal abortion, it now acknowledges, that "the cumulative consequence of such individual actions is catastrophic," describing the results as "carnage" and "no exaggeration to call this gendercide."
While the situation is most extreme in China, other East Asian countries, including Taiwan and Singapore, as well as the former communist states in the western Balkans and the Caucasus, and even sections of America's population all have distorted sex ratios. And the gender imbalance is even more pronounced in 2nd and 3rd pregnancies.
Why this destruction? The Economist cites three main reasons: the ancient preference for sons; the modern wish for smaller families; and ultrasound technologies that identify the sex of a fetus, leading to the common procedure of gender selection abortions. According to the article:
The increasingly availability of ultrasound and abortion has played a big part in the skewing of the sex ratio, as it is easier to abort a female foetus then to kill a female baby, especially if you know the sex of the foetus. Indian doctors once advertised the 'benefits' of ultrasound technology with the slogan: 'Pay 5,000 rupees today and save 50,000 rupees tomorrow' (the saving was on the cost of a daughter's dowry).
India and China now have tens of millions of young men without partners/wives, and this causes other problems, noted in the Economist article:
Young men have been responsible for the vast preponderance of crime and violence - especially single men in countries where status and social acceptance depend on being married and having children, as it does in China and India. A rising population of frustrated single men spells trouble.
The crime rate has almost doubled in China during the past 20 years of rising sex ratios, with stories abounding of bride abduction, the trafficking of women, rape and prostitution. A study into whether these things were connected concluded that they were, and that higher sex ratios accounted for about one-seventh of the rise in crime. In India, too, there is a correlation between provincial crime rates and sex ratios.
Countries close to China have also seen raids into villages, with smugglers and gangsters carrying off girls from native countries.
It is only natural that any culture that condones the evil of abortion would see the grisly practice used for reasons such as the desire to bear a son and not a daughter. This is no big news. The big question that should be on everyone's mind is, "Where is the feminist movement and their leaders now, when the tiniest members of their interest group need them the most?" Their silence is truly deadly.