the cuppboard

badwolfcomplex:

The Global War Against Baby Girls

This should be as profoundly disturbing to pro-choicers as pro-lifers. It’s like we pro-life feminists keep saying: women’s rights begin in the womb. Left unprotected, and the female population will be ruthlessly exterminated until there’s just none left.

Selections from the article:

It is by now widely recognized that these gender disparities are the consequence of parental intervention — namely, mass feticide, through the agency of medically induced abortion and prenatal gender determination technology. Chinese parents appear to have been generally willing to rely upon biological chance for the sex outcome of their first baby — but with increasing frequency they have been relying upon health care technology and services to ensure that any second- or higher-order baby would be a boy.

The critical health service elements in this tableau are China’s universal and unconditional availability of abortion conjoined with access to reliable and inexpensive obstetric ultrasonography. According to Chinese researchers, in 1982 diagnostic ultrasound scanning devices were available in health clinics in about one-sixth of Chinese counties; by 1985, over half of Chinese counties had them, and by 1990 virtually all did. By 2000, sex-selective abortion had become astonishingly commonplace in China: rough calculations for that year suggest that no less than half of the nation’s higher-parity female fetuses were being aborted, and that well over half of all abortions were female fetuses terminated as a consequence of prenatal gender determination. In effect, most of contemporary China’s abortions are thus intentional female feticides.

Though Western sensibilities may be inclined to attribute the national embrace of mass female feticide to “backward” thinking in China, important basic facts are uncomfortably inconsistent with that proposition. For one thing, abnormal sex ratios appear to be almost entirely a Han phenomenon within China — and China’s Han are, generally speaking, better educated and more affluent than the country’s non-Han minorities. Second, although SRBs are lower in urban than in rural China, these differences may have less to do with education and income than with fertility levels. After all, fertility levels are decidedly lower in urban than in rural China, meaning that a smaller proportion of babies born in China’s cities are higher-parity births, which tend in China to be overwhelmingly male. Third, China has enjoyed a historically extraordinary surge of development and prosperity over the very years that SRBs and child sex ratios have been rising.

China’s increasingly unnatural sex ratios for babies and children and its growing army of “missing girls” must therefore be regarded as a feature — indeed, a defining feature — of so-called “globalization with Chinese characteristics.” (Note, incidentally, that Beijing outlawed prenatal sex determination in 1989, and criminalized sex-selective abortion in 2004 — yet these legal strictures have obviously been ineffective despite the Chinese state’s considerable police powers.)

hina’s unnatural long-term rise in SRBs emerged under a draconian state-run population-control program. But coercive family-planning programs are neither a necessary nor a sufficient condition for widespread female feticide. This much is evident from SRB trends in East Asia’s four “Little Dragons”: Hong Kong, Singapore (more specifically, Singapore’s ethnic Chinese), South Korea, and Taiwan. All of those societies maintain voluntary family-planning programs — nevertheless, each of them has registered eerie increases in SRBs in the era of unconditional abortion and widespread access to inexpensive obstetric ultrasonography (see Figure 4, below). Approaching the dawn of the twenty-first century, SRBs in all four of these affluent and highly educated populations were a naturally impossible 108 or higher; and just as in China, SRBs were typically lowest (often “normal”) for the first-born babies and suspiciously elevated for all higher-parity births, as reported by Chai Bin Park and Nam-Hoon Cho in 1995 — a telltale sign of parental intervention through sex-selective abortion. Like China, these Little Dragons all had laws on their books proscribing prenatal gender determination and sex-selective abortion that did not forestall subsequent rises in their SRBs. Of all the Little Dragons, South Korea reached the most demographically disfiguring heights: an SRB of well over 114 in the early 1990s, not too different from China’s at that time. But South Korea’s SRB declined steadily thereafter, and by 2009 was, according to official state statistics, a practically “normal” 106 — a matter to which we shall return.

The article goes on to describe the all-too numerous other countries in which female feticide is running rampant.

From the conclusion:

Sex-selective abortion is by now so widespread and so frequent that it has come to distort the population composition of the entire human species: this new and medicalized war against baby girls is indeed truly global in scale and scope.

he consequences of medically abetted mass feticide are far-reaching and manifestly adverse. In populations with unnaturally skewed SRBs, the very fact that many thousands — or in some cases, millions — of prospective girls and young women have been deliberately eliminated simply because they would have been female establishes a new social reality that inescapably colors the whole realm of human relationships, redefining the role of women as the disfavored sex in nakedly utilitarian terms, and indeed signaling that their very existence is now conditional and contingent.

All in all, mass sex selection can be regarded as a “tragedy of the commons” dynamic, in which the aggregation of individual (parental) choices has the inadvertent result of degrading the quality of life for all — and some much more than others.

What are the prospects for mass sex-selective feticide in the years immediately ahead? Unfortunately, there is ample room for cautious pessimism. Although biologically unnatural SRBs now characterize an expanse accounting for something approaching half of humanity, it is by no means clear that this march has yet ceased. 

I would encourage all to get involved with some kind of organization like All Girls Allowed or Women’s Rights Without Borders.