WUNRN
GENDERCIDE
Killed, Aborted, or Neglected, at
Least 100 Million Girls
Have Disappeared - and the Number Is
Rising
Mar 4th 2010 |The Economist
IMAGINE you are one half of a young couple expecting your
first child in a fast-growing, poor country. You are part of the new middle
class; your income is rising; you want a small family. But traditional mores hold sway around
you, most important in the preference for sons over daughters. Perhaps hard
physical labour is still needed for the family to make its living. Perhaps only
sons may inherit land. Perhaps a daughter is deemed to join another family on
marriage and you want someone to care for you when you are old. Perhaps she
needs a dowry.
Now imagine that you have had an ultrasound scan; it
costs $12, but you can afford that. The scan says the unborn child is a girl.
You yourself would prefer a boy; the rest of your family clamours for one. You
would never dream of killing a baby daughter, as they do out in the villages.
But an abortion seems different. What do you do?
For millions of couples, the answer is: abort the
daughter, try for a son. In
For those who oppose abortion, this is mass murder. For
those such as this newspaper, who think abortion should be “safe, legal and
rare” (to use Bill Clinton’s phrase), a lot depends on the circumstances, but
the cumulative consequence for societies of such individual actions is
catastrophic.
It is no exaggeration to call this gendercide. Women are
missing in their millions—aborted, killed, neglected to death. In 1990 an
Indian economist, Amartya Sen, put the number at 100m; the toll is higher now.
The crumb of comfort is that countries can mitigate the hurt, and that one,
The Dearth and Death of Little Sisters
Most people know China and northern India have
unnaturally large numbers of boys. But few appreciate how bad the problem is,
or that it is rising. In China the imbalance between the sexes was 108 boys to
100 girls for the generation born in the late 1980s; for the generation of the
early 2000s, it was 124 to 100. In some Chinese provinces the ratio is an
unprecedented 130 to 100. The destruction is worst in China but has spread far
beyond. Other East Asian countries, including Taiwan and Singapore, former
communist states in the western Balkans and the Caucasus, and even sections of
America’s population (Chinese- and Japanese-Americans, for example): all these
have distorted sex ratios. Gendercide exists on almost every continent. It
affects rich and poor; educated and illiterate; Hindu, Muslim, Confucian and
Christian alike.
Wealth does not stop it. Taiwan and Singapore have open,
rich economies. Within China and India the areas with the worst sex ratios are
the richest, best-educated ones. And China’s one-child policy can only be part
of the problem, given that so many other countries are affected.
In fact the destruction of baby girls is a product of three forces: the ancient preference for sons; a modern desire for smaller families; and ultrasound scanning and other technologies that identify the sex of a fetus. In societies where four or six children were common, a boy would almost certainly come along eventually; son preference did not need to exist at the expense of daughters. But now couples want two children—or, as in China, are allowed only one—they will sacrifice unborn daughters to their pursuit of a son. That is why sex ratios are most distorted in the modern, open parts of China and India. It is also why ratios are more skewed after the first child: parents may accept a daughter first time round but will do anything to ensure their next—and probably last—child is a boy. The boy-girl ratio is above 200 for a third child in some places.
How to Stop Half the Sky Crashing Down
Baby girls are thus victims of a malign combination of
ancient prejudice and modern preferences for small families. Only one country
has managed to change this pattern. In the 1990s South Korea had a sex ratio
almost as skewed as China’s. Now, it is heading towards normality. It has
achieved this not deliberately, but because the culture changed. Female
education, anti-discrimination suits and equal-rights rulings made son
preference seem old-fashioned and unnecessary. The forces of modernity first
exacerbated prejudice—then overwhelmed it.
But this happened when
And all countries need to raise the value of girls. They
should encourage female education; abolish laws and customs that prevent
daughters inheriting property; make examples of hospitals and clinics with impossible
sex ratios; get women engaged in public life—using everything from television
newsreaders to women traffic police. Mao Zedong said “women hold up half the
sky.” The world needs to do more to prevent a gendercide that will have the sky
crashing down.
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