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There is a movement in the United
States to ban sex-selective abortions. Pro-abortion critics have denounced this
as an assault on abortion rights by pro-lifers. But a quick glance at
international statistics suggests that sex-selective abortion is no dystopian
fantasy. It is a chilling reality in many countries in Asia. New evidence shows
that it is now spreading to the U.S., Canada, and Europe.
As everyone knows, modern
medicine allows parents to learn the sex of a baby before it is born. Widespread
abortion makes it possible to eliminate the less desirable sex, which in most
cultures means females. Sex-selective abortion, as it is called, is especially
serious where population control programs restrict parents to one or, at most,
two children. Up to 200 million unborn baby girls may have been killed in this
way, mostly in Asian countries. The selective elimination of female fetuses has
serious social consequences.
Gendercide in Asia
Consider the situation in India,
which has a de facto two-child policy. The British medical journal The
Lancet recently estimated that as many as half a million female fetuses are
aborted there each year because of their gender. In New Delphi alone, reported
The Hindu newspaper, “one in seven female fetuses is said to be aborted."
Since the mid-1980s, when ultrasound
technology began allowing parents to learn the sex of their children before
birth, the number of Indian girls per 1,000 boys has declined from 962 in 1981
to 927 in 2001.
The disparity is even more lopsided
among middle-class urban families because of their greater access to
ultrasounds. Here the number of girls per 1,000 boys drops into the 800s, or
even lower. The lowest recorded number of girls is found in some high-caste
urban areas of Punjab, where only 300 girls per 1,000 boys survive gestation.
The problem extends beyond India. A
recent United Nations Population Fund report says at least 60 million girls are
"missing" in Asia because of to sex-selective abortion, infanticide and neglect.
The most egregious example is China, where a brutally enforced one-child policy
has produced a national ratio of 117 boys born for every 100 girls, with some
provinces posting ratios of more than 130 boys per 100 girls. The shortage of
girl children is obvious to anyone who visits rural China, as I have recently.
Demographers predict that there will be 30 million more Chinese men than women
of marriageable age by 2020. The practice is also found in other “Confucian”
cultures, such as South Korea and Vietnam.
Sex-selective abortion, otherwise
known as '”female feticide,” is illegal under Indian and Chinese law, but these
laws are not rigorously enforced and, as a result, have scarcely curbed the
practice.
As investigative journalist Gita
Aravamudan argues in her 2007 book, Disappearing Daughters: The Tragedy of
Female Feticide, "Female infanticide is akin to serial killing. But female
feticide is more like a holocaust. A whole gender is getting exterminated."
Perhaps we should call sex-selective abortion “gendercide.”
The Socioeconomic Causes of
Sex-Selective Abortion
It would be easy to regard female
infanticide and, by extension, female feticide, as traditional practices—the
Chinese Communist Party would say “feudal”—that modernization, industrialization
and rising levels of education will soon extinguish. This is, in fact,
precisely what the Beijing regime claims.
The problem with this interpretation
is that female feticide is not a relic of an atavistic past, but a
rational—which is not to say, moral--response to certain Asian political,
demographic, and economic realities. The patriarchal impulses that lead to son
preference may be being eroded away by modernization, but this gradual cultural
evolution is overshadowed by population control policies that drive fertility
downward and an urban, consumerist lifestyle that works alongside this to
universalize the small family norm.
Traditional explanations for son
preference revolve around continuing the family name and carrying on the
patrilineage. But propping up these cultural practices are stern economic
realities. In both India and China, girls are transitory members of a family,
since they marry out, generally leaving home upon marriage to take up residence
with their husband and his in-laws. That is to say, just as they enter into
their productive years, they cease to contribute labor or goods to their natal
family. This makes them, as the Chinese say, “Goods on which one loses.”
Moreover, even while girls remain in the family they generally earn less than
boys.
The Chinese government, in
particular, has urged an end of patrilocality, arguing that only daughters do
not need to marry out, but instead can bring in a husband to support her elderly
parents. The stringencies of the one-child policy condemn this idea to failure,
however, since it is highly unlikely that an only son would abandon his own
parents in order to care for those of his wife. This is just one way in which
China’s population control program reinforces the prejudice against giving birth
to daughters.
The prejudice against girls in Asia
is not limited to men, but is, ironically enough, found throughout the
population, including the distaff side. If you ask Indian schoolchildren
whether they prefer a brother or a sister as a sibling, the vast majority will
say they would prefer to have a brother. Girls, they will say, cost more to
their parents.[i]
In many countries, a new bride’s
status in the family is not secure until she produces a son. A distraught
Indian daughter-in-law who had just aborted her first child—a girl—was quoted as
saying, “As it is, I have no place in my house, and my daughter would most
certainly have been worse off. There would have been ghee and milk for my
brother-in-law's sons and not even a roti for her - plus the land would have
been theirs, too."[ii]
In traditional times, this
preference for sons led to female infanticide or, in wealthier areas, to couples
simply continuing to reproduce until they conceived a son. Not so very long
ago, every Chinese village of any size contained at least a few families who had
had five, six, or seven girls in succession, followed by a little brother. The
point of their reproductive exuberance was to end with a son.
Government demands to limit
childbearing to one (China) or two (India, Vietnam, and South Korea) means that
parents no long enjoy this option of simply continuing to reproduce until they
conceive a son. In this way, population control programs combine to reinforce
the age-old bias toward boys and make the womb a disproportionately dangerous
place for girls.
This discrimination against women
cannot be reduced to a simple question of dowry or brideprice. In India, a
bride is expected to bring a substantial dowry with her when she marries, while
in China, the man, or his family, provides a brideprice to the young woman
parents. Both countries, however, suffer from an epidemic of female feticide.
Some Indians maintain the
requirement that girls bring a dowry with them upon marriage is the primary
driver of sex selective abortion. “The day grooms become available without a
hefty price tag attached to them, female feticide will end,” comments Dr Amrit
Sethi.[iii]
That this is an oversimplification can be seen from the case of China, where the
payment of a brideprice to the parents of the bride is the custom. The fact
that a young woman in China commands a fee does not offset the fact that she is
going to live with, and help support, her husband’s family for the rest of her
life. It is the long-term economic liability dictated by patriarchal customs
that drives couples to the abortion clinic, not the immediate costs or benefits
surrounding the marriage ritual itself. The fact that the Chinese population
control program is more rigorously enforced than India’s may also help to offset
the perception that, because of the custom of paying a brideprice, that there is
any economic advantage to be gained from raising a daughter.
The Cultural and Social Consequences
of Sex Selective Abortion
First, we should recognize that the
practice of sex-selective abortion itself is a contributing factor to the
ongoing degradation and devaluation of women.
That is to say, the practice of
aborting female fetuses not only stems from a demeaning attitude to women, but
also reinforces it in each and every case. Each tiny corpse is a mute testimony
to the low value placed on female life.
There are a multitude of social
consequences as well.
In economics, price reflects
scarcity. The scarcer a good, the higher the value that is placed upon it. By
extension, one might think that creating an “artificial” shortage of women by
selectively aborting female babies would raise their value. In a narrow
economic sense this may be true. In China, for example, brideprices seem to be
rising. At the same, however, sex selective abortion seems to be devaluing
women. The overall “worth” of women, in terms of their societal standing, seems
to be on the decline.
To put it another way, women are
being treated more and more as a commodity. This has led to early and coerced
marriages of young girls, increased violence against women in general, and more
exploitation of women and girls through the region's already burgeoning sex
slave trade.
A kind of slave trade has sprung up
in and around India and China. How this works is as follows: Women are
kidnapped from their native villages and taken to a distant province. There
they are sold to the highest bidder, who in China may be a farmer interested in
acquiring a wife or in India a brothel owner seeking to expand his line of
prostitutes.
Modern-day sex trafficking also
crosses national borders. Young women from Vietnam and Burma are lured into
China on the promise of factory jobs, only to find themselves working in a
brothel. Young girls from North Korea—one of the poorest countries on earth—are
sometimes sold by their parents to Chinese traders who promise to find them a
husband among China’s millions of bachelors.
While sex-selective abortion clearly
lowers to societal worth of women, this is not to suggest that skewing the sex
ratio in favor of males in any way benefits males. Prostitution and
homosexuality are on the rise in China, as is the crime of rape, as single men
seek sexual outlets outside of marriage.
Men may be frustrated in other ways
as well, especially by their inability to form families after the normal
fashion, that is to say, with a wife and natural or adopted children. This may
drive them to seek surrogate families, such as gangs, the military and, in the
Chinese context, secret societies. A gang, as has been remarked, is a kind of
surrogate family, with the gang leader in the role of father figure, and the
gang members serving as siblings. The military offers the brotherhood of the
barracks, with the commanding officer in the role of pater familias. So,
too, does the secret society offer brothers and fathers.
Sex Selective Abortion Comes to the
West
Most Westerners rightly recoil from
sex-selective abortion, but it is neither illegal nor unheard of in Western
countries. Lax abortion laws and technological access make it easier than ever
for parents to target and delete unwanted daughters or sons before birth.
A new study suggests that female
feticide may be disturbingly common in some Asian-American communities. In an
analysis of 2000 Census data published recently in the Proceedings of the
National Academy of Sciences, Columbia University economists Douglas Almond
and Lena Edlund examined the sex ratio of births among U.S.-born children of
Chinese, Korean and Asian-Indian parents. They found what they called
"son-biased sex ratios,” that is, a higher ratio of boys to girls than would
occur in nature.
Taking their study a step
further, they considered the effect of birth order. First-born children of
Asians showed normal sex ratios at birth, roughly 106 girls for every 100 boys.
If the first child was a son, the sex ratio of the second-born children was also
normal.
But what happened if the
first child was a girl? In that case, the second child tended to be a boy.
"This male bias is
particularly evident for third children,” they reported. “If there was no
previous son, sons outnumbered daughters by 50%." That means that, for every 150
boys, there were only 100 hundred surviving girls. The rest had been eliminated.
The authors quite rightly
interpret this "deviation in favor of sons" the only way they possibly could,
namely, as "evidence of sex selection, most likely at the prenatal stage." In
other words, as early as a decade ago, Asian-American communities in the U.S.
were already practicing sex-selective abortion.
Similar sex imbalances have also
been documented among Canada’s Asian immigrant communities. The
Toronto Globe & Mail
reported that “Figures from the 2001 census supplied by Statistics Canada
suggest a slight skew in the usual gender ratio among people with South Asian
backgrounds. . . . According to the 2001 census data, the proportion of girls
under 15 in the South Asian communities of Mississauga and Brampton is two
percentage points below the ratio for the rest of the population in those
municipalities.”
Such numbers do not mean that most
Asians living abroad practice sex selection, of course. What the numbers do
suggest is that this ultimate form of misogyny can happen in any culture that
fails to defend the intrinsic dignity of every human life.
What is to be Done?
Sex-selective abortion is
rightly seen by many as the ultimate form of discrimination against women.
Overwhelming numbers of Americans oppose the practice. According to 2006
Zogby/USA Today poll, 86% would like to see it banned. Yet, at present, it
remains legal in the U.S. to abort a child for any and all reasons, including
the fact that she happens to be a little girl.
Some have suggested that
the use of ultrasounds to detect the sex of unborn children could be banned.
This is a nonstarter. The Chinese government has such a ban in place, and it has
proven completely ineffective.
Besides, ultrasound
technology has been a boon for life. Sonograms have saved the lives of countless
mothers and babies in high-risk pregnancies. Employed in crisis pregnancy
situations, sonograms have convinced untold numbers of women that they are
carrying babies (not ‘blobs of tissue’). For most couples, learning the sex of
their unborn child before she was born (as my wife and I did) underlines the
personhood of the unborn. It does not provide a pretext for an abortion.
I think that the answer
lies elsewhere, in a straightforward ban of sex-selective abortion itself.
Former Senator Jesse Helms, each year that he was in the U.S. Senate, introduced
legislation to ban sex-selective abortion. The language was simple, yet
powerful: “It shall be illegal to perform an abortion for the sole purpose of
sex selection.”
A bill to ban sex-selective
abortion now languishes in the U.S. House of Representatives, hostage to the
abortion issue. The pro-abortion leadership of that body continues to
countenance the ugliest form of misogyny imaginable, a misogyny that kills.
The reason for this inaction
is that most American feminist leaders have remained silent in the face of this
modern atrocity. Their refusal to brook any limits on abortion rights has led to
one of the bitterest ironies of our post-feminist age: that the abortion license
touted as the key to liberating future generations of women would become the
preferred means of eradicating them.
This is the worst form of sex
discrimination in the world.
Endnotes:
[i]
One NGO carried out such a survey of schoolchildren in an
infanticide-prone area in India, and found that 99 percent of the
schoolchildren expressed a preference for a brother for precisely this
reason of cost. [ii] The Tribune of
India, 6 May 2001. [iii]
The Tribune of India,
27 June 2003
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