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There’s a natural ratio of men to women for our species, and it is not equal. For every 100 girls, 105 boys are born. But in some places, like India and China, the ratio is skewed. One Chinese city recorded an astounding 163 boys born per 100 girls. So, why is this happening?
The ultrasound.
The expanding use of this technology has allowed expecting parents to abort unwanted girls and keep the boys. The ability to sex-select has caused the disappearance of an estimated 160 million girls in Asia alone.
In this Marketplace segment, Stephen J. Dubner reports on the unintended consequences that come with new technology. You’ll hear from Mara Hvistendahl, the author of Unnatural Selection: Choosing Boys Over Girls, and the Consequences of a World Full of Men, Stephen Quake, a biophysicist at Stanford, and Freakonomics co-author and University of Chicago economist Steve Levitt.
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There is also a paper saying it’s better for poor families to have girls because they can marry up a rich man. In skewed sex ratios, the worst off are poor men because no one wants to marry them.
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For a Chinese take on the matter, there’s this chart: http://shanghaishiok.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/11/Sheng-Nan.png
The “leftovers” in the Chinese dating market are the smart, capable, urban women and the poor, rural men.
In order to try and prevent femal infanticide, India has made it illegal to find out the sex of a child prior to birth. The doctor/ultrasound tech is prohibited from revealing the sex of the child to the parents. Passing a law and stopping the practice are however two completely different things.
There will be unintended consequences of the unintended consequences.
I wonder what will happen when ultrasound technology advances to the place where we can determine whether an unborn child will have dimples or not? or the color of the baby’s eyes? or their odds of making a perfect score on the SAT?
You cannot toss away millions of unborn girls like you are choosing between pairs of shoes, yet not somehow, someway, eventually feel the pent up anger of God or the universe for treating human babies with less regard than we treat Great White Sharks.
Men have supposedly went to war for women. One day it might be more literal than we imagined. Of course, the good news is that the war will thin out the male numbers…then we can start over.
This is not about pro-choice vs. pro-life. You can be pro-choice and still realize that to treat unborn children like choosing between supermarket meat items is somehow wrong.
Umm. Don’t forget infanticide.
Nobody likes showing up to a party and seeing that it’s a sausage fest, do they? Most girls don’t even like it. Why not make it illegal to abort a female, but only allow abortions for males? Good times for all!
This isn’t happening in a vacuum. Ultrasounds aren’t the *cause*, they’re just the tool. This sex selection is happening in a country with a one-child policy and a strict paternal ancestral line. The family, with rare exceptions, is traced through the males’ lineage. If you don’t have a boy, your family line dies out. Granted, if he can’t have a boy, the family line dies out too, but it takes another generation or two.
And those female babies who aren’t aborted or killed? Often given up for adoption. My cousin volunteered in a Chinese orphanage that was set up to disburse babies for adoption. There were 200 babies in it, only 4 were boys. If China had a two child policy, would the sex ratios be so skewed? Would the orphanages be less full, and have fewer girls?
Lastly, I wonder how the “groups of young men with no hopes of getting dates/wives” effect couples with the “you’re our only boy and we put all our resources and hopes for the future into you and no way will we let the army throw you away in war” effect. This will be the first time in the history of the world that a country was full of only-children, and I am curious how that skews the standard responses to stress situations.
This is alarming because history indicates that societies w/ disproportionate number of men with no prospect to ever marry tend to have higher crime rates and incidents of violence.