In China, from 2010 – 2012 there were approximately 119 men born for every 100 women. From 2013 – 2015 that sex ratio was 117 to 100. At a mere glance, these are just numbers, but what do these statistics actually reveal? What significance does the average birth of nineteen more males than females annually suggest? What significance indeed, when the natural sex ratio turns out to be a mere 105 men to 100 women – a fourteen digit difference.
“China has 30 million more men than women,” declared Chinese journalist and author of “One Child,” Mei Fong, “30 million bachelors who cannot find brides,” Five years later, that disconcerting number remained unaltered. Until 2021, the same statistics persisted in India. These trends seem to indicate a disquieting reality – girls are going missing. The question is – what happened to them, and why is no one talking about this?
It should come as no surprise to learn that, among other nations, China and India experience absolutely staggering rates of female foeticide and sex-selective abortion. According to researchers from King Abdullah University of Science and Technology in Saudi Arabia, by 2030, 6.8 million fewer female births will occur in India because of the constant reliance on selective abortions.
“In China,” argue researchers Therese Hesketh, Li Lu, and Zhu Wei Xi, “there is now clear evidence that sex-selective abortion accounts for the overwhelming number of ‘missing women.’”
Given pre-existing cultural prejudice against female offspring, female infanticide has been common practice within many parts of Asia.
“Sons are preferred because they have a higher wage-earning capacity (especially in agrarian economies), they continue the family line, and they usually take responsibility for care of parents in illness and old age,” Hesketh, Lu, and Xi noted.
There are also specific local reasons for son preference: in India, the expense of the dowry; and in South Korea and China, deep-rooted Confucian values and patriarchal family systems. These cultural implications, compounded with national efforts such as China’s infamous One Child Policy, further incentivized the preference of male children to female.
“When you create a system where you would shrink the size of a family and people would have to choose, people … choose sons,” argues Mei Fong.
Yet, with the emergence of newer ultrasound technology in the early 1980s, the number of female fetuses and infants killed in the Asian continent skyrocketed well into 2005, leading to the extraordinary sex ratio imbalances we see today.
This phenomenon went on largely unaddressed until the repercussions of such imbalances inevitably manifested. In 1989, the People’s Republic of China went so far as to criminalize all prenatal sex determination and India followed suit in 1994 through the Pre-Conception and Pre-Natal Diagnostic Techniques Act. To this day, in both countries, sex determination is considered a medical malpractice. Perhaps this is disquieting information for those of us born and raised in the West, where gender reveal parties and preparations mark many of the expected celebrations associated with pregnancy. But in nations where fetuses are most likely to be aborted the moment female genitalia are observed on the ultrasound, medical procedures can’t afford to be as lenient. Despite the intentions of these legal efforts, female foeticide and sex-selective abortions are still conducted with impunity by qualified doctors and personnel in both in India and China.
The most disturbing point to consider is the fact that this erasure of women via abortion doesn’t appear to be relegated merely to Asian nations. As argued by economist and researcher Nicholas Eberstadt, the global sex ratio at birth reached unnatural levels in the early 2000s.
“Sex-selective abortion is by now so widespread… that it has come to distort the population composition of the entire human species: this new and medicalized war against baby girls is indeed truly global in scale and scope,” Eberstadt said. It thus remains a tragic, undeniable fact that given increasingly advanced ultrasound technology, abortion has become the means by which so many women around the world never make it beyond the womb, simply because of their gender.
In light of all this, one has to wonder where the feminists went. Why has no rallying cry emerged from the West, the most vocal opponent of sexist oppression and the epicenter of calls for legal gender reform? One must wonder why there has been such deafening silence instead. Can it be that while we were protesting at Women’s Marches, condemning the lack of access to abortion, we forgot who actually pays the price of that practice around the world? How can organizations like the United Nations recognize the skewed sex ratios, appalling rates of female foeticide, abortion, and infanticide and yet continue to advance abortion as a medical procedure necessary for the rights of women? How did the Western feminist movement let so many women disappear without so much as an attempt at opposition?
This is where the terrible irony lies. While Planned Parenthood advocated the seemingly sacred right of women to destroy the unborn, it is females who are bearing the brunt of that destruction. What a terrible disillusionment, to realize the great defenders of womankind advance that practice which destroys our numbers every day. When did the feminist movement advocate selective support of the oppressed creatures it claims to stand for? The fight for justice for women apparently devolved into one only for those outside the womb – who then remains to fight for those still in utero?
“If abortion is about women’s rights,” asked abortion survivor Gianna Jessen at a 2015 House Judiciary Committee Hearing, “then what were mine?”
India and China are lessons, not myths. The warning signs reared themselves decades ago, and the 23 million missing women are the undeniable casualties. Neither the pro-choice movement nor self-proclaiming feminists can afford to support platitudes like “My body, my choice.” Such euphemisms come largely at the expense of female fetuses. And on that note – Happy Women’s History Month.