I thought it was all about the one child policy in China. But it's much more than that. And in many more countries, too. There are just too many wrong reasons why so many people in so many places terminate the life of so many female babies and fetuses--millions of them. And so many more people appear willing to observe and abide it. It's about the preference for male children in those places, and all the anachronistic cultural and legal reasons that make that so.
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 China and northern India more than 120 boys are being born for every 100 girls. Nature dictates that slightly more males are born than females to offset boys' greater susceptibility to infant disease. But nothing on this scale.
And it's not just China and Northern India. It's Armenia, Azerbaijan, Georgia, Taiwan, Singapore and South Korea, among other places. And what are the principle reasons? First of course, is the historical cultural preference for males--because of the historical need for physical strength, dominance, defense and work, yes--but also anachronistic rules of primogenitor and dowry. But modern times add other factors that exacerbate and sharpen the point on the problem:
- lower fertility levels--an evolving preference for smaller families (and in China, the one child law); and
- advancing medical technology--ultrasounds and other methods of identifying the sex of a fetus.
And it's not just about the poor. To the contrary, it's as often about the educated and employed. The article:
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.
And then there are the unintended demographic and societal consequences, the significant imbalances in numbers of young men and women in those places, the lack of marriageable women for so many young men. In China, the problem is already so acute that they have a name for it: these single men are called "bare branches."
A longer, complementary article in the same edition of the Economist expands on these issues. It starts with estimates of the numbers of young females denied life:
In January 2010 the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences (CASS) showed what can happen to a country when girl babies don't count. Within ten years, the academy said, one in five young men would be unable to find a bride because of the dearth of young women—a figure unprecedented in a country at peace.
The number is based on the sexual discrepancy among people aged 19 and below. According to CASS, China in 2020 will have 30m-40m more men of this age than young women. For comparison, there are 23m boys below the age of 20 in Germany, France and Britain combined and around 40m American boys and young men. So within ten years, China faces the prospect of having the equivalent of the whole young male population of America, or almost twice that of Europe's three largest countries, with little prospect of marriage, untethered to a home of their own and without the stake in society that marriage and children provide.
Gendercide—to borrow the title of a 1985 book by Mary Anne Warren—is often seen as an unintended consequence of China's one-child policy, or as a product of poverty or ignorance. But that cannot be the whole story. The surplus of bachelors—called in China guanggun, or "bare branches"— seems to have accelerated between 1990 and 2005, in ways not obviously linked to the one-child policy, which was introduced in 1979. And, as is becoming clear, the war against baby girls is not confined to China.
Parts of India have sex ratios as skewed as anything in its northern neighbour. Other East Asian countries—South Korea, Singapore and Taiwan—have peculiarly high numbers of male births. So, since the collapse of the Soviet Union, have former communist countries in the Caucasus and the western Balkans. Even subsets of America's population are following suit, though not the population as a whole.
--"Gendercide: The worldwide war on baby girls," International Section, The Economist (March 6-12, 2010)
Think about that. Stated another way, in ten years there will be approximately 30-40 million young girls denied life in China alone. That's a stunning, numbing, horrific number. So let's dig a little deeper into some of these data. That article continues:
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 (ie, 124 boys were born in those years for every 100 girls). According to CASS the ratio today is 123 boys per 100 girls. These rates are biologically impossible without human intervention.
The national averages hide astonishing figures at the provincial level. According to an analysis of Chinese household data carried out in late 2005 and reported in the British Medical Journal*, only one region, Tibet, has a sex ratio within the bounds of nature. Fourteen provinces—mostly in the east and south—have sex ratios at birth of 120 and above, and three have unprecedented levels of more than 130. As CASS says, "the gender imbalance has been growing wider year after year."
Are there other longer-term societal implications of all this? Yes, there is the obvious problem with a dearth of marriageable women, and the resulting circumstances of the "bare branches." But if we keep following our unmarried young men, we start to see the many other societal problems that will likely follow. From the same article:
Throughout human history, 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. In "Bare Branches"††, Valerie Hudson and Andrea den Boer gave warning that the social problems of biased sex ratios would lead to more authoritarian policing. Governments, they say, "must decrease the threat to society posed by these young men. Increased authoritarianism in an effort to crack down on crime, gangs, smuggling and so forth can be one result."
But there is hope, or at least some progress made by one of the countries we've mentioned. South Korea has significantly improved their ratio of young men to young women. And they have done it in the most obvious way of advancing countries: they've advanced their education of women, their laws (including anti-discrimination laws) and campaigns to change cultural expectations. The article:
Yet the story of the destruction of baby girls does not end in deepest gloom. At least one country—South Korea—has reversed its cultural preference for sons and cut the distorted sex ratio. There are reasons for thinking China and India might follow suit.
South Korea was the first country to report exceptionally high sex ratios and has been the first to cut them. Between 1985 and 2003, the share of South Korean women who told national health surveyors that they felt "they must have a son" fell by almost two-thirds, from 48% to 17%. After a lag of a decade, the sex ratio began to fall in the mid-1990s and is now 110 to 100. Ms Das Gupta argues that though it takes a long time for social norms favouring sons to alter, and though the transition can be delayed by the introduction of ultrasound scans, eventually change will come. Modernisation not only makes it easier for parents to control the sex of their children, it also changes people's values and undermines those norms which set a higher store on sons. At some point, one trend becomes more important than the other.
In conclusion, the Leadership article first quoted offers this prescription:
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.
Amen.
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