The War on Women review is written by Jonathan Last in WSJ:
Mara Hvistendahl, in "Unnatural Selection," is worried about girls. Not in any political, moral or cultural sense but as an existential matter. She is right to be. In China, India and numerous other countries (both developing and developed), there are many more men than women, the result of systematic campaigns against baby girls.
In nature, 105 boys are born for every 100 girls. ... Yet today in India there are 112 boys born for every 100 girls. In China, the number is 121—though plenty of Chinese towns are over the 150 mark. ... But the imbalance is not only in Asia. Azerbaijan stands at 115, Georgia at 118 and Armenia at 120.
What is causing the skewed ratio: abortion. ...couples are having abortions when (ultrasound imaging tests are used to tell them that) the mother is carrying a girl. ... (S)o many sex-selective abortions have occurred in the past three decades that 163 million girls are missing from the world.
Call these "fetuses" or "unborn children" or "girls." The result is the same. Millions of very, very young females are being killed.
The boys are preferred because they are expected to take better care of aging parents. Meanwhile the tens of millions of extra unmated males are generating staggering changes on Asian societies.
More below :::
Secretary of State Hillary Clinton opposes sex-selection abortions. Question is what she will support to combat this pattern. "Obviously, there’s work to be done in both India and China, because the infanticide rate of girl babies is still overwhelmingly high," she says. "Unfortunately, with technology, parents are able to use sonograms to determine the sex of a baby, and to abort girl children simply because they’d rather have a boy. And those are deeply set attitudes."
She adds she is seeing “openness and commitment” by the governments of India and China in confronting these practices. Outlawing these practices ? Not on the table at the United Nations. Not a policy topic either within these governments or in the international conversation.
This book aims to change all that.
Mara Hvistendahl seeks to outlaw these killing indirectly by focusing squarely on misuse of the modern ultrasound tool -- the sonograph. Revealing the sex of fetuses, in the opinion of Ms. Hvistendahl, must be be stopped in Asia as quickly as possible.
Unnatural Selection: Choosing Boys Over Girls, and the Consequences of a World Full of Men.
Medical personnel in the developing countries pick up $10 a pop for using the ultrasound/sonogram to determine sex in utero for fetuses. If it's a girl then they pick up another $100 for performing an abortion. Do this 163,000,000 times and you've got a business. (Lying about boy fetuses might add a few million here and there. It all adds up.)
The steps to outlaw misuse of the ultrasound tool:
-- Ban the practice of revealing the sex of a baby to parents during ultrasound testing.
-- Support the ban with enforcement.
-- Run national sting operations. Mete out a large number of not very long jail sentences and rather longer revocation of licenses for medical professionals who reveal the sex of babies.
-- Possible registration systems for women carrying female fetuses. This should be combined with protections for girls from sex-selection related abortions.
The Guardian and The Atlantic Wire have odd articles blaming the West for these abortions. But inventing the tool aside, manufacture is from China, Japan, South Korea... all over. The West does nothing whatsoever to encourage use of ultrasound imaging to drive sex-selection abortions.
Back in 1979 the United Nations Family Planning Agency made a grant of $50-million to China. This was used by the One Child program to encourage abortion with posters in villages. Eventually, by the 1990s, abortion replaced infanticide as the prime means in Asia to effect sex-selection.
Boy, oh boy, did that work. One Child became One Boy. Abortions exploded.
"The effects of the major UN agency tasked with population advocacy distancing itself from the issue of sex selective abortion are immense," she writes, noting that the agency's foot-dragging has discouraged other global funds from engaging with the crisis.
-- from The Guardian article
Asia is seeing the early result today. Countries where this has taken hold have floods of unattached, unmarriageable young men. Cities where there are labor jobs for unskilled men see sex ratios like 2:1, 3:1, 4:1. Crazy stuff.
These effects spill over from one country to the next. In Vietnam there are "marriage agencies" that buy wives for South Korean families where the girl-shortage has hit especially hard.
Armies of these extra young men -- formed up from the millions of unnatural bachelors --
could well cross borders -- invading neighboring countries as has happened for millennia. Political excuses will be cited, but the underlying reasons will be about sex. 50,000,000 extra Chinese males -- not exactly a recipe for peaceful progress. The government, there, is putting millions of these guys in uniforms as police and reservists.
Among the tertiary effects of these killings and the resulting sex imbalance is the Chinese savings obsession -- some 50% of personal income. That, in turn, drives their appetite for U.S. Treasury Bills. Buying wives for single boys is expensive in China, so America gets a free ride for now in matters of finance. We pay low interest rates to cover our national borrowing binge -- our bizarre 43% of total Federal outlays in 2012.
India is still on the old dowery system. Wives pay, not the grooms. But that can't last. The shortage of girls in Northeast India has to kill off the dowery system there within the next 2 or 3 years. The international "marriage agencies" are already active there, despite laws, bidding good money for healthy girls.
Going from a poor family in India to a wealthy family in South Korea or China ? Worse things happen. Of course these specific migration events make the situation just a bit worse in India.
Killing human females in Asia with sex-selection abortions is a modern plague. 163,000,000 extra female fetuses tossed in the trash cans so far.
Bottom Line
The UNFPA needs a top-to-bottom shakeup. Other NGOs need to take similar steps. Management in place with these organizations must be changed over to make elimination of sex-selection abortions the # 1 priority for international family planning.
Otherwise, these woman-devaluing killings will continue and all those millions of unmarried extra males will inflict violence and other social costs on Asian societies.
Where do Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton stand on this issue ? More to the point, what are they going to do ? What are UNFPA and the other NGOs going to do ?
So far, killing girls is not a front-burner problem. Killing 163,000,000 of them ??? So far not a word from our planetary plutocracy. Apparently the girls don't matter, but maybe this can be turned around.
If so, Mara Hvistendahl will be remembered. She is the one, the writer with fluency in English, Chinese, and Spanish, who has made the case.