Selective abortion blamed for India's missing girls

[rodeodance]

........"Female infanticide of the past is refined and honed to a fine skill in this modern guise," Sheth added........

http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/india_abortion_dc;_ylt=AinMae5wF8msQUxzDhyCFsys0NUE;_ylu=X3oDMTA3ODdxdHBhBHNlYwM5NjQ-


Selective abortion blamed for India's missing girls

Sun Jan 8, 7:47 PM ET

LONDON (Reuters) - About 10 million female fetuses may have been aborted in India over the past two decades, according to research published on Monday.

A team of scientists who analyzed female fertility figures from a national survey of 6 million people in India found that there were about half a million fewer girls born in the country in 1997 than expected.

Extrapolated over 20 years, the figure would be 10 million, the researchers said in a report published online by The Lancet medical journal.

[wickerwoman]

1. Anyone who doesn't want a girl, doesn't deserve one.

I have to admit that I'm of a mixed mind over this. But as a girl who was raised by parents who really, really wanted a boy instead, I can't see forcing parents to give birth to a child of an undesired gender. I find the same argument with people worried that parents would start aborting gay children once the gene is isolated. Do we really want homophobic assholes giving birth to gay children? What kind of life will that give the kid?

Deep cultural mysogyny is the problem here, not access to technology. But watch the fundies argue that this is an excuse to outlaw abortion.

[LisaL]

2. But what that leads to in the end-they might

end up having all these boys, but who are these boys going to marry? Stupid is as stupid does, I suppose.

[wickerwoman]

4. What's the alternative?

Outlawing abortion? Forcing parents to give birth to children they don't really want? Kids know when they aren't and can never be what their parents want them to be. And it is devestating for their self-esteem and sense of identity. I'll trade fewer girls born if it will ensure that they are raised by loving, mature, non-mysogynistic parents. If parents can't accept what they get, they have no business being parents in the first place. But since we can't stop idiots from reproducing in the first place, the next best thing is ensuring that they don't end up with a kid they are going to screw up royally.

[LisaL]

5. I am not saying abortions should be outlawed.

What I am saying is that countries like India and China will end up having millions of millions more men than women. Men who would obviously want to get married one day, but won't be able to. Maybe then they will realize the folly of their ways.

[tblue37]

12. What they end up doing,

as in rural Chinese provinces, is kidnapping unwilling young women and forcing them to become "brides" against their will. (You could, of course, also call it sexual slavery.)

[Virginian]

17. Hope the surplus men

go into a monastery and not into an army.

[aquart]

14. When that happens, instead of valuing the few women they have...

Societies become rigidly restrictive. Women are flat out property.

[wickerwoman]

16. That hasn't been my experience.

I've been living in China for the past three years and I'd say the average Chinese girl, at least in the eastern half of the country is running the show to a far, far greater extent that the average American girl. Shanghai men do *all* of the housework. I have a number of students whose husbands do all of the cooking and cleaning while they shop for clothes and chat with their friends.

While the one child policy has had a negative effect in rural areas, in the cities, women are spoiled to an absolutely outrageous extent. I know 27 or 28 year old women who still consider themselves "girls", live with their parents, quit their jobs any time they break sweat and are completely supported by their families while they go out drinking until three or four every night. And it's not just the rich kids- I'm talking about women whose parents are farmers or shopkeepers. Many of the Chinese girls I know (and not just from Shanghai) lead their boyfriends and husbands around like dogs! I would never think of pulling some of the shit I've seen them get away with.

And younger Chinese men are much, much less macho than American men. It's totally normal for men and women to just be friends with no other agenda. Men don't act like doing the dishes, dancing, going shopping (basically doing anything besides watching sports and drinking) is the equivalent of castration.

While many, many Chinese women go out with Western men, I have never seen a Chinese man dating a Western woman. Most of them are scared shitless. While I've run into some problems with sexism at my job, I'd say, on the whole, that I felt devalued for my gender far more often in the U.S. than I ever have in China.

[Beausoir]

21. Very interesting post. Thanks. n/t

[aquart]

29. Well, that's the way it should be.

The historical sources I used said it wasn't so. I can't link because I read it so long ago. We'll see how it plays out. I like your way so much better.

Hey, China, your abandoned daughters are living middle-class in New York.

[Orsino]

27. Self-correction doesn't sound easy.

Male children earn greater salaries in India, and don't reuire dowries. It's not hard to imagine why parents might prefer boys. As noted above, though, the next generation pays the price; women will be harder to find, and will command greater dowries (which their husbands tend to control).

The situation must be more complicated than that, however. Arranged marriages are alliances between friendly families, so perhaps dowry inflation won't be such an important factor.

[Silverhair]

30. There is one village in India that kills ALL infant girls.

I don't have a link, I read about it several years ago. They go to other villages to get wives. Since they have the dowery system, then bridal dowrys are always paid into the village, but never by the village.

I have never understood the rational behind the dowery system. I can understand the primitive economics a "bride price" for buying a bride, but the dowery logic escapes me. Understand does mean I agree with it or think it is right. It means I can see the function it serves in certain societies.

[Tace]

32. Also -- Studies Show That National With Too Many Males Turn To War

It's been found to be true that societies with a high ratio of males to females inevitably turn to war. This leads to a reduction of the male population. Sad but true.

[SheilaT]

3. This is not really

breaking news, although this is a brand new article on this, which has been going on for a couple of decades or so. I saw a show on TV (wish I could recall which network) a couple of years ago which dealt with this, and it showed a village in India in which exactly one female has lived to adulthood in the past thirty years or so.

I would think that if the imbalance were to become great enough, females would become valuable as wives, but perhaps that's too much to hope for.

[fujiyama]

6. This is what happens

when humans fuck too much with nature.

In nature, the gender balance is approximately neutral. It is close to 50/50.

If they are going to do this, eventually the village(s) will collapse and all the men will have to relocate, because there is simply no way to reproduce without a large enough female population.

So, aside from the fact that what these people are doing is morally reprehensible (yes, aborting a baby just because it is of the 'undesired' gender is wrong), it is also very stupid.

[XemaSab]

13. In nature the gender balance isn't exactly even

there are actually slightly more women than men due to genetic weaknesses on the sex chromosomes.

[muriel_volestrangler]

22. Normally slightly more boys than girls are born

but the longer average lives of women mean the total population has more females than males.

Take a country where abortion is extremely difficult - such as Portugal - so that we don't think abortion of female embryos is skewing the figures, and look at the 0-4 age group in 2000: male 296,203; female 274,760 (source: US Census International Data Base). This pattern of slightly more boys than girls is seen in all countries - whether or not they are countries where abortion is generally allowed, or whether they're particularly patriarchal or not.

On edit: a better way of seeing this: a list of male:female sex ratio at birth for most countries.

http://www.nationmaster.com/graph-T/peo_sex_rat_at_bir

All are 1 or over. Interestingly, India is not particularly high up in this list - which may through doubt on how some statistics are being gathered, though which ones, I'm not sure.

[Crunchy Frog]

7. I read a really interesting book a few years ago

called May You Be the Mother of a Hundred Sons : A Journey Among the Women of India by Elisabeth Bumiller. You can find a description on Amazon.com.

She talked a lot about the practice of aborting female fetuses. Apparently it was already quite common by the mid 80's when she was there. The wealthier urban women used ultrasound machines to determine the fetal sex and then aborted the females. In the poorer rural areas, they still went the old fashioned way and killed female newborns outright. They apparently make use of old recipes for poisons made from local plants which they give to the female newborn in a time honored tradition.

She linked the practice very closely to the dowery system. Families of daughters are expected to pay huge doweries to the families of the men who marry them, and therefor having a daughter can ruin a family. There's also a prestige thing; people might look down on people who have daughters and no sons.

It's really a sick system. I can't imagine paying someone to marry my daughter, especially if there was a shortage of women like there is in India today due to all the killing. I would think that, the rules of supply and demand being what they are, families of daughters would be demanding payment from the grooms family for the privilige of marriage. Of course, people could always stop seeing each other as commodities and start seeing each other as people, but that's probably too much to expect.

[LisaL]

9. Yes, it's true. Marriages are arranged and

females are expected to pay dowry. Sounds crazy, doesn't it?

[tenshi816]

15. The same thing happens

in the UK. My 14-year old son is the result of IVF treatment. I got pregnant after three attempts and when I went for my first ultrasound scan at the fertility clinic, I asked the doctor treating me if they told patients the sex of their child during the scan. She hesitated and then said "it depends", and went on to say that they were more cautious about telling Indian, Pakistani and Chinese couples that they were expecting girl babies because they were far more likely to ask for an abortion, even after going through all the expense and stress involved with IVF.

Leaving aside the fact that the doctor clearly lacked a sense of discretion in giving me that information, it was a chilling thing to hear.

A few years before that, when my husband and I were backpacking around India, one night we were sitting in a small guesthouse in Kashmir having a cup of tea with the manager. We were talking about families and asked if he had children. He gave a big sigh and said yes, he had five daughters but also said that he had told his wife they had to continue having children until they "got lucky" and had a son.

[Tace]

33. The US Tradition Of The Bride's Family Paying For The Wedding...

is a form of dowery.

[Crunchy Frog]

34. Maybe.

I've never heard of a an American family contemplating aborting a female fetus over the prospect of paying for her future wedding though. I also haven't heard of families of a newborn daughter contemplating the prospect of financial ruin due to future wedding expenses, or of grooms families threatening the bride with death if her family doesn't come up with more cash, all of which are features of the dowry system in India from what I understand. It therefore does not have comparable social consequences.

[PDJane]

8. Morally reprehensible,

Utterly stupid, and very much against mother nature....and a rather odd way to control the population explosion.

[pocket]

10. this is why India and China will go to war again

well, one of the reasons.

[JI7]

11. they have had a female prime minister

and other females in high prominent places.

in India it's almost like 2 or more worlds living side by side. there are girls going off to larger cities to study and work while at the same time you still have shit like this where people kill baby girls because of some old fashioned system where the family of the girl is supposed to pay the family of the guy she ends up marrying. and because the parents view the sons as those who will care for them when they are older.

[anitar1]

18. I hope that the B------ds who make the women abort

females, suffer some day. China has a big problem becauses of this problem. Guess what? Not enough women to go around= not enough women to take care of husbands parents! I love it. Hope they keep it up. They will reap what they sow.

[OKNancy]

19. kick

[KittyWampus]

25. Oddly, this will give the women who ARE there more status. They will have

more clout and control over who they marry and the conditions they live in.

Same thing has happened in China.

[Crunchy Frog]

31. Maybe just the opposite though, ironically.

I've seen information on China where they are having serious problems with women and girls being abducted and sold due to the "demand", and being treated even more like commodities due to their scarcity.

It will be interesting to see what the long term trends are. Our own economy may be so far down the tubes soon that we'll see American women going off to China and India as "mail order brides".

It is very surprising to me that the dowry system in India is still so firmly in place given the scarcity of women and hence, presumably, their being in high demand. I would expect the families of daughters to begin demanding money from the families that they're marrying into.

[shugah]

20. India 'loses 10m female births'

India 'loses 10m female births'

More than 10m female births in India may have been lost to abortion and sex selection in the past 20 years, according to medical research.

Researchers in India and Canada for the Lancet journal said prenatal selection and selective abortion was causing the loss of 500,000 girls a year.

~snip~
In most countries, women slightly outnumber men, but separate research for the year 2001 showed that for every 1,000 male babies born in India, there were just 933 girls.

~snip~
In cases where the preceding child was a girl, the ratio of girls to boys in the next birth was 759 to 1,000.

This fell even further when the two preceding children were both girls. Then the ratio for the third child born was just 719 girls to 1,000 boys.

However, for a child following the birth of a male child, the gender ratio was roughly equal.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/south_asia/4592890.stm

[StatGirl]

28. The Hepatitis-B connection

There was an interesting piece at Slate a few months back:

http://www.slate.com/id/2119402/

Seems that "a pregnant woman with hepatitis B is far more likely to have a baby boy than a baby girl," and that may account for some of the missing females.

[cosmicone]

23. This is actually good

This practice has been followed in communities where girls were a liability because of the dowry and had almost no power.

By restricting the number of female births, the girls now have become increasingly powerful. In some places, the dowry has not only disappeared but actually boys have to come up with the dowry.

It has also resulted in a lower birth rate, thus better economic opportunities and less pollution.

Finally, the pendulum is swinging back and fewer and fewer such abortions are taking place.

As an eye-opener, it was not bad at all.

[FlaGranny]

24. Then they'll start aborting the boys. n/t

[KittyWampus]

26. No, FlaGranny. They'll start wars to keep all those young men busy.

[FranMonet]

35. popular movie

Well I guess Broke back mountain is going to be a popular movie in India what with all these boys and no girls. :pals: