Letters to the Editor
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It might not just be sex selection
I've read several articles recently in which it has been shown that certain chronic infections on the part of the mother, including toxoplasmosis, skew the ratio of births toward boys without any sex selection taking place. The current theory is that a weakened immune system is more favorable to male fetuses than a healthy one.
Anyway, this may also explain in part the shortage of girls in India.
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The One-Child Policy
Was relaxed by Deng Xiaoping as far back as 1983. Plus, families can have up to three kids even under the original "one-child" policy procedures.
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Hepatitis B
Alara: They could solve this with social security, financial support for the parents of girls, combating cultural attitudes, or even polyandry. Instead they're cracking down on the abortions. That's not going to work for the same reason cracking down on abortion never works... it's just going to end up with an even greater sex imbalance because women will die of underground abortions, baby girls will be put out with the trash, and young girls will be abused and neglected. The sex imbalance issue won't be redressed without positive reinforcement for the behavior of raising daughters; you can't make people raise children they don't want and get a good outcome, but you can fairly easily change what kind of children they want. Give families a hefty tax break or payout from the government for bearing daughters, none for sons, and I guarantee the problem will go away.
Yes, yes and yes. I disagree though that there's nothing wrong with sex-selective abortion. It's more humane than killing infants but still discriminates against one gender and created this gender imbalance.
Another study says that Hepatitis B caused the deaths of as many as 100 million females in China and India:
A number of authors (most notably Sen, 1992) have suggested that this imbalance reflects excess female mortality and, as a result, have argued that as many as 100 million women are missing." This paper proposes an explanation for much of the observed over-representation of males: the hepatitis B virus.
The author found that hepatitis B can explain about 45% of the missing women: around 75% in China, between 20% and 50% in Bangladesh, Egypt, and West Asia, and under 20% in India, Pakistan and Nepal.
The missing women problem has historically been understood as arising from a difference in preferences -- some countries value women less than others, and in these places women are mistreated to the point of excess mortality. The conclusions in this paper argue that perhaps preferences play a smaller role than previously expected, and biological differences a much larger one.
http://www.eldis.org/static/DOC18588.htm
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one child policy
I also got something of a negative connotation in the line that roughly stated "of course, no changes will be made to China's one child policy" ... I would not try to minimize the tragedy of the devaluation of women in Chinese society that leads to an excess of gender-specific abortions... however, human overpopulation of the planet is an unavoidable issue that needs to be addressed, sooner rather than later.
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Girl shortage in China
I have always thought that this is a problem that will eventually solve itself. When girls are scarce, they will become a very valued commodity. Furthermore, if parents have only one child each it seems logical that daughters will be raised to take care of their parents as they age as well as sons. I think it is ultimately most insulting to women to think that they would not assume that responsibility. If married couples are struggling to care for both sets of parents the pressure will be put on society for financial relief.
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Girl Power?
I don't think so.
"When girls are scarce, they will become a very valued commodity."
Valued to whom? The parents? The adults controlling the girls? Or the 13-15 year old girls themselves?
When girls are scarce, there has never been (that I know) a rise in the power to choose amongst the girls themselves. They will just be traded for goodies the the highest bidder.
Maybe when those girls end up women - then, maybe, they will be able to take advantage of their worth as a commodity.
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Simple solution
Encourage polyandry and/or homosexuality. Problem solved.
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Problem solved
if parents have only one child each it seems logical that daughters will be raised to take care of their parents as they age as well as sons. I think it is ultimately most insulting to women to think that they would not assume that responsibility. If married couples are struggling to care for both sets of parents the pressure will be put on society for financial relief.
If parents can only have one child, either sex can take care of the parents in old age since it's daughters-in-law doing the hands-on work anyway. Both sons and daughters should do the hands-on work. Problem solved.
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Misunderstanding of article
I think there is some hardcore misunderstanding of the subject, since a number of (male!) posters here think this is a dialogue about abortion rights.
The Chinese are not (and never have been) Christian, and don't have a Westernized view of abortion. Until very recently, there was widespread acceptance of killing infants at birth, for whatever reason -- usually just simple poverty and the inability to feed another mouth.
However, a lot of factors have caused the One Child Policy to backfire, that could not have been predicted, and one big one is the widespread adoption of female infants by westerners. Tens of thousands of baby girls have been taken permanently out of the country in the last 15 years, and while that doesn't sound enormous in a country of almost two billion, it does not take much to throw the balance of the sexes off -- ever play a game of musical chairs? All that matters in musical chairs is that YOU get a chair....if you don't, the lack of even a single chair becomes epic.
My opposition to the abortion of female only fetuses, for the purposes of sex selection, has nothing to do with my overall support of abortion rights. In the west, the idea of abortion rights is that the WOMAN has final say so over her body. In China (and also India and other Asian countries), a woman is often pressured and coerced by her husband and his family to kill her unborn daughter so that THEY can have a baby boy. This is not freedom of choice! This is the worst kind of lack of freedom and domination.
People ask "how can this be changed?" and I can point to the one, utterly enormous success of Chinese communism -- in only a few decades, they utterly overturned the practice of female footbinding in the 20s and 30s. Like the One Child Policy, this was in many ways accomplished by brutal control and a lack of freedom that is uncomfortable for Americans. Nonetheless, it worked. Today, no woman in China has bound feet, nor has for over 60 years. Even more impressively, the entire context of bound feet -- the idea that a woman is more beautiful if her feet are very, very tiny -- has been completely upended and destroyed, and this aspect was largely accomplished by propaganda, which said that unbound feet are good, beautiful, and positive.
Imagine anything like that in America culture -- it would be the equivalent of the government stepping in, banning emaciated models and photographs glorifying extreme thinnesss....and within one generation, we no longer worshiped skinny models and instead embraced the natural beauty of ordinary womanhood! Pretty amazing idea, huh?
So I think that this kind of policy can eventually correct the imbalances of the One Child Policy. China has made a good start by limiting foreign adoptions. Public education programs that focus on the positive aspects of having daughters would be another good start, as well as public help for women who are being coerced into having abortions of unborn daughters that they want to keep.
This is not a hopeless situations, but it IS an excellent learning opportunity for the whole world in the potential problems that arise when we try to manipulate society without taking into account the Law of Unintended Results.