The first question that anyone asks you when they find out you are pregnant is, "Do you know what you are having?". A girl or a boy??? And each answer is met with excited discussions of pink and blue, cute dresses, soccer/ballet practices, circumcision debates, potty training, and advice to meet the unique challenges of raising a boy or girl.... Or at least that has been my experience.
After reading
Mara Hvistendahl's book, "Unnatural Selection: Choosing boys over girls and the consequences of a world full of men," I have realized that my experience would not be typical in many places in the world. Indeed, if I was a Chinese woman, my sonogram results at 20 weeks showing a healthy female fetus might have resulted in hushed trepidation, quiet discussions with my husband and the painful decision to abort the fetus and try again for a boy. In China and India in particular, there is an overwhelming imbalance of boys being born over girls. In some parts of the world the sex ratio is more than 160 boys being born for every 100 girls. (This is far from the natural ratio of ~105:100 boys to girls. This small majority of boys to girls born neatly makes up for the evolutionary history of an increased risk of mortality in boys and young men). This imbalance is almost entirely due to sex-selective abortion of female fetuses. The result is 163 million "missing" girls, which Hvistendahl demonstrates, has already led to significant social upheaval, a denigration of the status of women, and may lead to even more unprecendented changes.
Where Hvistendahl triumphs is in her analysis of how this condition came to be. There is a tendency to blame this phenomenon on "deep-seated gender bias" and "traditional values" that only exists in "backwards, impoverished developing countries". The gender bias explanation is convenient because it hints at a very easy solution. All we need to do is educate poor women and men about the value of girls and the oppressive patriarchy will be overturned. The author admits that even she was not immune to this type of thinking; in her proposal for this book, she wrote, "The best way to convince couples to start having more girls is to improve the status of women by boosting opportunities for education and career advancement." The truth is, that education and career opportunities for women have been getting better throughout the world for decades! Even in the face of almost universal improvement in the status of women, the numbers of girls being born has steadily decreased. Gender bias is certainly part of the story, but the reality is much more complex.
Hvistendahl makes a convincing argument that the sex ratio imbalance has its roots in agressive population control measures largely initiated by elite western institutions. She tells the story of the hysteria initiated in the 1970's by Paul Elhrich's book,
The Population Bomb. This book created a generation of popular anxiety over the imminent threat of overpopulation (especially in developing Asian and African countries) that would lead to starvation, war, and the ultimate end of the human race. Hvistendahl goes on to argue that these sensationalistic concerns were underlyed by more insidious political motivations, including fears about the link between poverty and the spread of communism. In response to such pressures, in the 1960's and 70's organizations like the United Nations Family Planning Association (UNFPA) and the International Planned Parenthood Foundation (IPPF) began pouring millions of dollars into campaigns encouraging families to have less children. To add to the pressure, the World Bank made humanitarian aid efforts dependent on the condition that the countries meet the new, strict population restrictions. Thus began a generation of forced sterilizations, forced abortions and infanticide. Although shocking now, the hysteria of the time made permissible, "any means necessary," to restrict the population explosion.
In Elhrich's book, he notes the desire for male babies and that much of the resistance to the population control measures stemmed from a tendency to continue reproducing until a male heir was produced. He even muses that if only there were a way to ensure that couples could produce a male baby, then couples would voluntarily cease reproducing. Elhrich got his wish with the advent of inexpensive sonogram machines in the 80's that allowed for easy identification of male or female fetuses. The population growth rates dropped at record speeds, abortion of late-term female fetuses grew in popularity, and the ratio of boys to girls skyrocketed. A condition that remains today.
Regardless of the causes, the sex ratio imbalance has led to an alarming paucity of females. Which, most obviously, leads to a surplus of men who cannot find wives. This has led to an increase in the incidence of "mail-order-brides", sex-trafficking, prostitution and a general decrease in the status of women. Not only this, but the increase of young, unmarried men is speculated to be a possible cause of increased terrorism and war. This is the most speculative section of the book. No one really knows what the outcome of a dramatic increase in young, testosterone filled men will be. It is an experiment that has never been performed before. Nevertheless, Hvistendahl goes into a fascinating account of the historical situations where there has been a lot less females than males. This includes the "wild wild west" in the 1800's in America, and the early historical myths of Rome. Did I mention that this book is fabulously written? She has illuminated an issue that I had never even heard of and offers an extremely well-researched and meticulous analysis of the problem. It reads like a mystery novel at times, a scientific research paper often, and a memoir and biography at other times.
It is also fascinating how this issue has escaped public notice for so long. In a way, the fact that sex-selective abortion increased with little resistance, is understandable given that at the time it origniated it must have seemed like the most ethical population control measure yet! When compared with goverment bands of doctors rounding up women and forcing abortions and sterilization, couples actively
choosing to control their family as they wished and
voluntarily adhere to the population growth restrictions must have seemed positively utopian.
Many theorists are continuing to insist that the laws of supply and demand will hold true for human populations. Economist Gary Becker, and theorist Richard Posner wrote in 2009 that as the number of girls in comparison with boys increases, the value of wives and girlfriends will increase. (Don't worry! the free market will solve this problem, too!). Hvistendahl points out that this is only true in the crudest sense, that as they become rarer, women simply cost more as a commodity. Men must amass quite a bit of wealth to afford a wife, but the woman herself has not become more valued and she certainly does not benefit personally from the transaction. Indeed the whole economic logic here is quite silly, as Hvistendahy points out that,
"no majority group has ever aspired to become a minority under the illusion that a decrease in numbers will somehow lead the group's members to be more valued by society."
In the case of the scarcity of women, this imbalance is more likely to make life worse. In seems counterintuitive, but the more valuable a woman is, the higher the risk that they will be deprived of that value. Indeeed, as the sex ratio becomes more and more imbalanced, it sets back the status of women considerably. Parents are worried that their daughters will be abducted and sold into slavery, or on the other hand, poor parents will actively sell their daughters into marriage. Laws to 'protect' women, like outlawing western fashions on college campuses, have grown in popularity, and have the effect of restricting the hard-won freedom of women. Either way, given the problems with being female under these circumstances, I believe I would choose to try and have a boy instead of dealing with these problems.
In addition, the issue is so politically charged and complex that the response of feminists and reproductive rights advocates is to simply avoid the problem or fall back on simplified "gender bias" arguments that ignore the issue of the misuse of abortion. Hvistendahl writes,
"If feminists and reproductive rights advocates bring up abortion in the devoloping world today, it is ordinarily to point out how many women die of botched operations in countries where abortion is illiegal. They don't talk about abortion being used for dark purposes. They don't talk about how the culture surrounding abortion has changed in Asia...."
Indeed the problem of abortion's misuse in countries where it is used for sex-selective abortion is very different from the situation in western countries. In western countries a woman who chooses to abort is very early in her first pregnancy, young, poor, and unmarried. Multiple abortions by one woman are relatively rare in western countries. On the other hand, the average woman choosing to abort for reasons of sex-selection is aborting after 20 weeks (the time when sex can be determined by sonogram). She is typically married with 1 or more children, educated, wealthy, and has already had 2 or more late-term abortions. It is clearly not the same problem, but activists have good reasons for avoiding criticizing abortion on any level. Criticism can easily be latched on by anti-abortion groups who are dedicated to eliminating abortion regardless of the circumstances and reasons.
"After decades of fighting for a woman's right to choose the outcome of her own pregnancy, it is difficult to turn around and point out that women are abusing that right- that in union with population pressures and technology, choice has been perverted"
The entire concept of "choice" indeed has been perverted when you take into account the economic, political, and social reasons for choosing boys over girls. UNFPA officers are warned against identifying sex selective abortion itself as a human rights abuse, because it implicates the choice of the women who perform it. Indeed, officers are instructed to not even use the word, "abortion", instead they should call it "prenatal sex-selection", which obviously doesn't really describe what's going on. The A-word is simply too dangerous. But the damage that sex-selective abortion has done to the condition of women warrants some attention from feminists and women's groups, even if it means confronting the A-word. It's not enough to insist that the patriarchal suppression of society is causing this problem, we must look at the factors that influence women's choices.
This book is very much worth reading. It's fast moving and filled with illuninating anecdotes, eccentric political and historical characters, and meticulously researched facts. Please check it out so that I can have someone to talk to about this stuff!
