This weekend marked the 38th anniversary of the Roe v. Wade Supreme Court decision making abortion legal in all 50 states. Whichever side of the debate you are on - whether you think that decision deplorable or beneficial - it is worthwhile at such a juncture to take stock of where it has gotten our society.
In particular it brought to mind an article that was the cover story in The Economist several months ago: Gendercide: What happened to 100 million baby girls? Intrigued by the small pair of lonely pink shoes on the cover, I dove in, feeling increasingly ill as I read the article. I had heard about this problem, but had no idea of its magnitude.
Apparently, demographers tracking trends in several developing countries: China, India, Singapore and Taiwan, are finding that sex ratios of boys to girls, which should naturally be at most 106 to 100, have risen severely among people under 20 in the past 25 years. In China the current sex ratio is 123. The other countries are not far behind. Demographer Nick Eberstadt blames "the fateful collision between overweening son preference, the use of rapidly spreading prenatal sex-determination technology and declining fertility."
So basically, in societies where fertility is falling and giving birth to a son is of extreme societal importance, families are finding out the sex of the child by ultrasound and then aborting her if she's a girl, or else leaving her to die of exposure after birth. Where fertility is falling either because of strict government policy (China) or because of population control programs that supposedly "help women," (India) the problem is greatly exacerbated; the pressure is all the greater for those few babies to be boys.
The crazy thing is that this is not a problem of "rural ignorance;" in both India and China, skewed sex ratios show up more heavily in wealthier and more educated parts of the country. Instead of helping women, population control programs have succeeded in dooming millions of baby girls to death by neglect, abortion or outright infanticide.
But as horrific as this already is, it is only the start of the problem. What each of those families does when it rejects a baby girl may be an individual decision, but consider its effect on society as a whole. It is extremely short-sighted. By 2020, China will have 30-40 million more men than women under 20. That is roughly the number of young men under 20 currently in all of America. Imagine the entire young male American population growing up with no prospect for marriage and children and the stability they bring. Do you know what that spells? TROUBLE. Sure enough, in the past 20 years, as sex ratios have risen, so has the crime rate in China, including bride abduction and the trafficking of women. I find myself wondering what Chinese civil wars loom in the future.
Now then, in America we feel enlightened, and are certain that we would never reject our daughters in the same way, even though there is some evidence of the same problem among certain populations. Reading the article made me suddenly feel fiercely protective of my beautiful, promising daughters who happened to be born before my sons. Western society has thankfully come to embrace the role of women, with all our abilities and capabilities, not least the perpetuation of the species.
But what other choices are Americans making that affect all of our society? I learned recently that while African Americans make up only 12% of the population of the United States, African Americans make up 30% of its abortions. I also discovered that African Americans are the only American minority in decline. Whatever your personal view of abortion, you would have to agree that there is something alarming about this. Is it any less horrific than the gendercide in India and China? Could it be that the same faulty and condescending notions of "helping women control their fertility" have been promulgated in certain populations in our own society, to similar devastating effect?
But those are statistics we don't like to think about, much less feel that we should know about. I wonder what unforeseen debilitating long-term consequences we will suffer as a society because of the huge loss of numbers in the black population.
It seems that any time we humans try to play God and mess with what He has given us, we end up worse than before. Demographers in China are discovering too late the unintended results of social manipulation. Too many young men will be without a wife, unless they can import one or steal somebody else's. How can that possibly be in any way beneficial to women? How can aborting away our minorities possibly make our country a better place?
