Opinion 160 million and counting
Why does talk about missing women skip over the uncomfortable reality of abortion?
In 1990,the economist Amartya Sen published an essay in The New York Review of Books with a bombshell title: More Than 100 Million Women Are Missing. His subject was the wildly off-kilter sex ratios in India,China and elsewhere in the developing world. To explain the numbers,Sen invoked the neglect of third-world women,citing disparities in health care,nutrition and education. He also noted that under Chinas one-child policy,some evidence exists of female infanticide. The essay did not mention abortion.
Twenty years later,the number of missing women has risen to more than 160 million,and a journalist named Mara Hvistendahl has given us a much more complete picture of whats happened. Her book is called Unnatural Selection: Choosing Boys Over Girls,and the Consequences of a World Full of Men. As the title suggests,Hvistendahl argues that most of the missing females werent victims of neglect. They were selected out of existence,by ultrasound technology and second-trimester abortion.
The spread of sex-selective abortion is often framed as a simple case of modern science being abused by patriarchal,misogynistic cultures. Patriarchy is certainly part of the story,but as Hvistendahl points out,the reality is more complicated and more depressing. Thus far,female empowerment often seems to have led to more sex selection,not less. In many communities,she writes,women use their increased autonomy to select for sons, because male offspring bring higher social status. In countries like India,sex selection began in the urban,well-educated stratum of society, before spreading down the income ladder.
Hvistendahls book is filled with unsettling scenes,from abandoned female foetuses littering an Indian hospital to the signs in Chinese villages at the height of the one-child policys enforcement. (You can beat it out! You can make it fall out! You can abort it! But you cannot give birth to it!) The most disturbing passages,though,are the ones that depict self-consciously progressive Westerners persuading themselves that fewer girls might be exactly what the teeming societies of the third world needed.
Unnatural Selection reads like a great historical detective story,written with the sense of moral urgency that accompanies the revelation of some enormous crime.
But what kind of crime? This is the question that haunts Hvistendahls book,and the broader debate over the vanished 160 million.
The scale of that number evokes the genocidal horrors of the 20th century. But most of the abortions were (and continue to be) uncoerced. The US establishment helped create the problem,but now its metastasising: the population-control movement is a shadow of its former self,yet sex selection has spread inexorably with access to abortion,and sex ratios are out of balance from Central Asia to the Balkans to Asian-American communities in the US.
This places many Western liberals,Hvistendahl included,in a distinctly uncomfortable position. Their own premises insist that the unborn arent human beings yet,and that the right to an abortion is nearly absolute. A self-proclaimed agnostic about when life begins,Hvistendahl insists that she hasnt written a book about death and killing. But this leaves her struggling to define a victim for the crime that shes uncovered.
Its society at large,she argues,citing evidence that gender-imbalanced countries tend to be violent and unstable. Its the women in those countries,she adds,pointing out that skewed sex ratios are associated with increased prostitution and sex trafficking.
These are important points. But the sense of outrage that pervades her story seems to have been inspired by the missing girls themselves,not the consequences of their absence.
Here the anti-abortion side has it easier. We can say outright whats implied on every page of Unnatural Selection,even if the author cant quite bring herself around.
The tragedy of the worlds 160 million missing girls isnt that theyre missing. The tragedy is that theyre dead.ROSS DOUTHAT
Share
