160 miljoner kvinnor saknas i Asien

Jag fick email om en ny bok som verkar komma med bättre underlag om frågan om ofödda flickobarn än vad vi haft tidigare. En forskare i Peking vid namn Mara Hvistendahl om förra veckan ut med en studie som vänder upp och ner på en del fakta. Bland annat påstås USA vara orsak till genderoblansen i Sydkorea, som är mins lika allvarlig som i Kina. Här är några kommentarer:


The natural sex ratio at birth for humans is 105 boys for every 100 girls; anything beyond a ratio of 107 is biologically impossible. Compare that to China, where the 2010 census found a sex ratio at birth of 118 boys for every 100 girls. These numbers may not mean much now, but in twenty years the skewed sex ratio—which is mostly the result of sex selective abortion—will pose a colossal challenge. By 2030, a projected one in five Chinese men will lack a female counterpart, with tens of millions of men unable to find local wives.

The prognosis for China’s neighbors is no less bleak: there are over 160 million females “missing” from Asia’s population, more than the entire female population in the U.S. Conventional wisdom attributes the imbalance to factors like China’s one-child policy, the preferences for sons in Asian cultures, and the low social status of women, and holds that economic progress will halt the trend. But the gender imbalance has spread across racial, socioeconomic, and religious lines in and beyond Asia to countries as varied as Georgia, Azerbaijan, Armenia, and Albania, and even some groups in the United States. It has diffused so rapidly that Christophe Guilmoto, a leading demographic expert on sex selection, compares it to an epidemic.

Science correspondent Mara Hvistendahl travelled to 9 countries interviewing mothers, doctors, demographers, trafficked women, mail-order brides, and men doomed to bachelorhood to further explore the global gender imbalance, and UNNATURAL SELECTION details a much more complicated story. Paradoxically, sex-selective abortion is the byproduct of economic development—as countries grow richer, people have fewer children, increasing pressure on women to have a boy on the first or second try. The sex determination technology that spreads with economic development makes that goal possible.

Hvistendahl also found unexpected seeds of the problem planted in the frantic response to an earlier global scare. In their haste to solve the population hysteria in the 1960s and ’70s epitomized by Paul Ehrlich’s bestseller The Population Bomb, Western organizations like the World Bank, International Planned Parenthood Federation, and the Rockefeller Foundation funneled aid and grants into population control efforts. Their research and influence provided the intellectual basis for China’s one-child policy and strict population targets adopted in India, Singapore, South Korea, and elsewhere.

Sex selection was seen as an effective tool, and other, more coercive tactics were also used in order to achieve those goals. In South Korea, Western funding enabled the creation of a fleet of mobile clinics—reconditioned U.S. Army ambulances donated by USAID—that performed sterilizations, intrauterine device insertions and, some say, abortions. Not all of the operations were voluntary. In 1977, doctors in Seoul performed 2.75 abortions for every birth, which is the highest documented rate in human history. Hvistendahl argues that the relentless promotion of abortion there and in other Asian countries traditionally resistant to abortion is one of the reasons so many women now abort for sex selection