If you were asked to name the technologies whose proliferation inadvertently threatens the human race, what would you include? IEDS? Assault rifles? Nuclear warheads?
Add this one to your list: the sonogram machine.
The widespread use of sonogram technology--coupled with liberal abortion laws--has made it possible for women to identify the sex of their child so that those without a Y chromosome can be killed before they're even born. Last year, in a speech before the U.N., demographer Nicholas Eberstadt revealed the details of this frightening trend:
Over the past five years the American public has received regular updates on what we have come to call “the global war on terror”. A no-less significant global war—a war, indeed, against nature, civilization, and in fact humanity itself has also been underway in recent years. This latter war, however, has attracted much less attention and comment, despite its immense consequence. This world-wide struggle might be called” The Global War Against Baby Girls”.
The effects of this war on girls can be seen in the changes in the sex ratios at birth. Eberstadt explains that there is a "slight but constant and almost unvarying excess of baby boys over baby girls born in any population." The number of baby boys born for every hundred baby girls, which is so constant that it can "qualify as a rule of nature", falls along an extremely narrow range along the order of 103, 104, or 105. On rare occasions it even hovers around 106
These sex ratios vary slightly based on ethnicity. For example, in the U.S. in 1984 the rates were: White: 105.4; Black: 103.1; American Indian: 101.4; Chinese: 104.6; and Japanese 102.6. Such variations, however, remain small and fairly stable over time.
But Eberstadt finds that in the last generation the sex ratio at birth in some parts of the world has become "completely unhinged." Consider this graph from provinces in China in 2000:
(Click to enlarge)
The red lines indicate where the rates should be based on what is naturally, biologically possible. Yet in a number of Chinese provinces--with populations of tens of millions of people--the reported sex ratio at birth ranges from over 120 boys for every 100 girls to over 130 boys for every 100 girls. Eberstadt notes that this is "a phenomenon utterly without natural precedent in human history."
China is not alone in the war against baby girls. In India the ratios are almost as significant. For example, in 2001, 927 girls were born for every 1,000 boys, significantly below the natural birth rate of about 952 girls for every 1,000 boys. By 2004, the New Delhi-based magazine Outlook was reporting that the sex ratios in the capital had plummeted to 818 girls for every 1,000 boys and that in 2005 they had dropped to 814.
In fact, biologically impossible ratios are found in various countries around the world, including Armenia, Azerbaijan, Cyprus, El Salvador, Egypt, Georgia, Greece, Hong Kong, Libya, Macedonia, Malaysia, Pakistan, Republic of Korea, Taiwan, Tunisia, Yugoslavia, and Venezuela. There are also numerous countries around the world where the "death rates for little girls, on an episodic or on a regular basis, are higher than those for little boys."*
This threat to baby girls, however, is not just an international phenomenon but one that also strikes here in the U.S. Sex ratios at birth for the Chinese-American population, the Japanese-American population, and the Filipino-American population, and for the Asian-American population as a whole are out of kilter, as this graph shows:
Early this year, the British medical journal Lancet estimated the male-female gap at 43 million with 100 million "missing girls" who should have been born but were not. Fifty million would have been Chinese and 43 million would have been Indian. The rest would have been born in Afghanistan, South Korea, Pakistan, and Nepal. (Keep in mind that this figure doesn’t include the "missing girls" in the other seventeen countries with impossible birth ratios.)
What is fueling this crisis? Eberstadt credits the "freakish" ratios to the "fateful collision" between (a) overweening son preference, (b) the use of rapidly spreading prenatal sex determination technology coupled with gender-based abortion, and (c) the low or dramatically declining fertility levels.
Even if we set aside the moral horror of a world that is killing its daughters, this oft-ignored trend of female feticide could pose a greater threat than many of the high-profile concerns that are touted by the media. For instance, the Chinese government says that by the year 2020--only thirteen years from now--the men in that country will outnumber women by 300 million. Imagine hordes of men, numbering in the hundreds of millions, who will never be able to have sexual contact with a woman, never be able to marry, and never leave a descendant to carry on their lineage. Think about the level of anger and frustration that will be generated. Now consider the fact that the number of males fit for military service (ages 18-49) in the U.S. is currently and remains steady at 54 million.
Will we have the sense and the fortitude to act, both domestically and internationally, to avert such a disaster? Or will we let our inviolable right to abort baby girls trump our very survival?
The West constantly frets about the levels of global CO2 emissions. But we should be even more concerned about the imbalance in the level of global testosterone. As we will soon realize, changes in our global climate are a minor threat compared to the havoc that will result from the changes in global demographics.
[Note: This entry is crossposted from EvangelicalOutpost.com]
*Those countries are: Afghanistan, Algeria, Angola, Antigua and Barbuda, Bahamas, Bahrain, Bangladesh, Barbados, Mexico, Benin Gabon, Bhutan, Bolivia, Botswana Gambia, Brunei, Burkina Baso, Burma, Burundi, Cambodia, Cameroon, Central African Republic, Chad, Chile, Columbia, Comoros, Congo, Costa Rica, Cote d’Ivoir, Cyprus, Dem. Republic of the Congo, Djibouti, Dominican Republic, Equatorial New Guinea, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Ghana, Guatemala, Guinea-Bissau, Haiti, Honduras, Iran, Iraq, Israel (non-Jewish pop), Italy, Jordan, Kenya, Kuwait, Lebanon, Lesotho, Liberia, Luxembourg, Madagascar, Malawi, Maldives, Mali, Mauritania, Mauritius, Mongolia, Mozambique, Namibia, Nauru, Nepal, Nicaragua, Niger, Nigeria, North Korea, Norway, Oman, Peru, Puerto Rico, Reunion, Rwanda, Sabah, Sao Tome, Sarawak, Senegal, Sierra Leone, Somalia, Sri Lanka, Sudan, Swaziland, Syria, Thailand, Tajikistan, Tanzania, Togo, Uganda, Yemen, Uruguay, Zambia, and Zimbabwe.
Comments (3)
- For future reference, try not to mix 'males per 100 females' and 'females per 1000 males' forms of statistic - it makes comparison difficult. The math to convert one to the other is quite simple.
- Its a problem, but I think the post is exagerating. An upset gender ratio is not enough to lead to the collapse of civilisation.
- At least this will slow the out-of-control population growth that many of those countries have been showing.
- Having identified the looming problem, what is the proposed solution? Banning abortion would be far too contriversial, and there are other ways to bias the odds towards a male child anyway (Centrifugal sperm sorting - commonplace in animal breeding, it could be adapted for humans). Not to mention the backstreet- or do-it-yourself methods of abortion, once someone gets their ultrasound results. Those ultrasounds have too much medical importance to restrict. China has laws against sex-selective abortion, but the need to prove motive makes them very hard to enforce. So what else is left?
April 26, 2007 11:09 AM | Comment Permalink
I wish we could do something, but the problem seems to be that in these cultures, boys are simply more highly valued.
Perhaps Chinese culture will evolve to deal with the problem of not enough women. Perhaps Chinese women will begin taking two or more husbands.
April 26, 2007 6:31 PM | Comment Permalink
An interesting point... the ratio of male-female birts in China used to be significently different from the ratio of male-female one-year-olds - a disparity due to female infanticide occuring quite frequently. Disposing of a baby and making it seem like natural causes is not that difficult.
The ratios have returned to a closer level now though - any parent's who would be willing to kill a baby daughter would also be willing to have an ultrasound and possible sex-selective abortion, so there is just no more reason for sex-selective infanticide now.
A point that pro-life campaigners overlook regarding china is that were they do do something to prevent sex-selective abortions, it might very well trigger a return to the more primitive methods of the past.
April 27, 2007 9:53 AM | Comment Permalink