Unnatural Selection; Abortion And Gender Imbalance

Since the late 1970s, 163 million female babies have been aborted by parents seeking sons
Mara Hvistendahl has written a troubling book. Her book Unnatural Selection, details the worsening gender imbalance that plagues much of the developing world. Parents prefer to have boys. Well not exclusively, but as Ms Hvistendahl points out enough to the point a marked gender imbalance is occurring in the developing world. Normally there are 105 boys born for every 100 girls. In India it is now 112 boys to each 100 girls and in China the number 121. In many Chinese villages the number may be as high as 150. But the imbalance is not only in Asia. Azerbaijan stands at 115, Georgia at 118 and Armenia at 120. World wide the ratio is 100 to 107.
In the mid-1970s, amniocentesis, which reveals the sex of a baby, became available in developing countries. As parent now knew beforehand the sex of the child, the decision to abort or not to abort was increasingly determined by the gender of the unborn. "Better 500 rupees now than 5,000 later," reads one ad put out by an Indian clinic, a reference to the price of a sex test versus the cost of a dowry.
But oddly enough, Ms. Hvistendahl notes, it is usually a country's rich, not its poor, who lead the way in choosing against girls. "Sex selection typically starts with the urban, well-educated stratum of society," she writes. "Elites are the first to gain access to a new technology, whether MRI scanners, smart phones—or ultrasound machines." The behavior of elites then filters down until it becomes part of the broader culture. Even more unexpectedly, the decision to abort baby girls is usually made by women—either by the mother or, sometimes, the mother-in-law.
Parents demand boys. Take South Korea. In 1989, the sex ratio for first births there was 104 boys for every 100 girls—perfectly normal. But couples who had a girl became increasingly desperate to acquire a boy. For second births, the male number climbed to 113; for third, to 185. Among fourth-born children, it was a mind-boggling 209. Even more alarming is that people maintain their cultural assumptions even in the diaspora; research shows a similar birth-preference pattern among couples of Chinese, Indian and Korean descent right here in America.
So what will the future look like? Maybe something like the American wild west in the 19th century. Here migration was the culprit. Young men did indeed go west. In 1870, for instance, the sex ratio west of the Mississippi was 125 to 100. In California it was 166 to 100. In Nevada it was 320. In western Kansas, it was 768. Logically though not pointed put in the book, east of the Mississippi must have been inhabited by "spinster" women. If it was the gender imbalance that made the west so wild, the coming century might be one most of us would not want to see.