There are 163 million females missing in Asia. But no one is searching for them. They were victims of sex selection procedures – mostly abortions – in societies that favor sons over daughters.
The disproportionate ratio of males over females in many countries, particularly China and India, is growing at an alarming rate. And Mara Hvistendahl believes we should worry about it.
“Even using the conservative UN population projections, which assume that couples soon start having boys and girls in equal numbers – a change that is highly unlikely – restoring the global balance of males and females will take until 2050.”
In “Unnatural Selection”, Hvistendahl seeks to find out why the world’s sex ratio is becoming dramatically lopsided in favor of males. She carefully explores contentious topics – abortion, sex-related genocide, post-colonialism – without becoming trapped in a tinderbox one match away from exploding in political controversy.
Hvistendahl succeeds because “Unnatural Selection” focuses on dispassionate statistics rather than relying on emotional testimonies. She doesn’t offer her personal opinion about abortions or go into details about when a fetus can be considered a human being. Instead, she focuses on the lack of rights for females.
The book is a welcome foil to Half the Sky, a similarly-themed but guilt-inducing book by the New York Times’ Nicholas Kristof and his wife Sheryl WuDunn. Hvistendahl doesn’t want readers to feel guilty. She just wants them to pay attention.
The book lets the numbers talk, and it doesn’t look good for females in India, China, and South Korea, where most of her research is based. Hvistendahl analyzes an incredible amount of data to reveal how these countries have systematically committed fetal femicide.
Today with the help of Western technology, for every 100 females born, India has 112 males, China has 121, Armenia has 120.
A normal ratio is 105 males for every 100 females. The extra five percent accounts for the fact that males are more likely to die young. Anything above 107, she says, is impossible without human intervention.
If missing females are the unseen symptom of sex selection abortions, the growing army of “surplus men” is its presenting symptom – one that warns of a grim future if what the author calls the disease of sex selection is left untreated.
The disease is spreading with the help of medical technology, which has made the biologically impossible now routine. By the mid-1990s, ultrasound machines were available in India, China, Singapore, and South Korea. Hvistensdahl cites demographers who noticed a sudden increase in the sex ratio in regions where the technology was introduced, leading them to conclude people were using ultrasound exams to determine gender and abort female babies.
Hvistendahl describes advertising for ultrasound tests in some clinics in Mumbai with the message “better 500 rupees now than 500,000 later.” Hvistendahl says that the ad refers to the high cost of dowries. It implies, she says, that “thanks to cheap technology, daughters, and the expensive dowries that accompanied them, were now avoidable.”
Hvistendahl points out that paternalistic customs in developing countries, such as favoring males over females in inheritances, have been exacerbated by the introduction of technology that help families establish a male heir. And it’s usually the wealthy, educated elite who receive first access to these technologies.
China’s one-child policy has led to the most extreme gender discrepancies. For example, Suining, China, a region that has experienced an economic boom since the 1990s, now has a sex ratio of 152 boys for every 100 girls. Hvistendahl says while Chinese culture typically prizes sons, ultrasound tests made it possible for families to choose a male as their only child, aborting pregnancies of female children.
While abortion is legal in India and China, Hvistendahl points out that fetal sex selection is illegal. It’s tricky distinguishing between the two and enforcement is difficult. The fines imposed against sex selection are deemed relatively small compared to the financial burden that daughters are believed to cause.
Hvistendahl, a Beijing-based reporter, states that China is now experiencing increased violence by men that she claims is the result of the new gender imbalance. She says that the wave of knife attacks by men against children in 2004 and 2010 took place in communities with a high percentage of males.
The author develops a historical argument about the dangers of a “world full of men”. Hvistendahl argues that a male dominated world is often unstable and violent, and females tend to be victimized by high rates of prostitution, forced marriages and female trafficking. But she doesn’t elaborate except to cite examples from history, such as America’s Wild West and China’s Qing dynasty. Hvistendahl offers no contemporary examples or empirical data to support her argument.
Moveover, Hvistendahl fails to explain why she doesn’t test her theories in countries where women are typically treated poorly, such as Saudi Arabia.
“Unnatural Selection” contains a lot of information even though Hvistendahl methodically organizes the data so that readers won’t easily get lost in the numbers. The details are overwhelming and several characters have to be re-introduced throughout the book.
The problem with “Unnatural Selection” is that it is difficult to understand who the book’s target audience is. Is it the government officials who she says have not been taking sex selection seriously? Is it the doctors who help to abort fetuses? Is it the academics who observe the societies where sex selection takes place? What about the feminists and the NGOs?
If so, it would seem that “Unnatural Selection” is written for an audience that is already aware – perhaps to a limited extent – of sex selection and its consequences.
The statistics may distract curious readers who think that the topic is interesting but don’t want to trudge through the numbers.
At the same time, the book’s strength is the statistics because if readers are willing to process the information, they’ll discover that the issues stemming from sex selection procedures are far reaching, going beyond Indian and Chinese societies. Everyone is eventually implicated because the fluidity of international borders globalizes local issues.
In Hvistendahl’s words, “left unaddressed, the gender imbalance snowballs.” And we all may suffer the consequences.
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