All abortions are not created equal. The numbers are chilling: around the world, babies prenatally identified as female are far, far more likely to be aborted than male babies. This has resulted in many major societies now having a huge imbalance in genders: there are way too many young men and not nearly enough young women.
This summary of the situation in The New Atlantis adds up the birth dearth: “The unnatural ‘girl deficit’ for females 0-19 years of age as of 2010 would have totaled roughly 32-33 million by both UNPD and IPC figures.” That’s more than 30 million young men around the world who have absolutely no chance of ever starting a family of their own and, oh yeah, more than 30 million women who never even got to be born.
These abortions have nothing to do with “choice,” “rights,” “lifestyle,” or any of the other usual Western tropes. These 30 million babies were aborted simply because they were girls. If they had been male, most if not all of them would have been carried to term and delivered. Ironically, making abortion one of the vanguards of American feminism has resulted in a global trend that has purposely decimated the Earth’s female population.
My wife and I are expecting another baby in May. I couldn’t be happier. It’s a girl.
I had no time to peruse the New Atlantis essay the other day, so decided to come back when I have a bit of time. That was an instructive article written from, I would guess, a “pro-life” perspective. I would not contest the bleak statistics. It is how this study is written more as a scare piece than an analysis of the Global population development.
One thing I’d like to add is that if we look at places where these statistics did not go, but where enlightenment has been strong, i.e. Northern Europe (the northernmost place in all the stats referred to was Austria, with its strong Catholic tradition (though mostly Lutheran now, the Habsburgs were guarantors of Rome’s position there until the aftermath of WWI.)
For its simplicity, I’ll take Finland, where population statistics are accurate and available in Finnish, Swedish and English at http://stat.fi/ . They’re not intrusive, but instructive. The db search form has more in it than one realises at first. In the interest of brevity, let’s just cite a few simple numbers.
Start by year 1910. The youngest five-year (0-4) cohort had 102.6 males, while the 20-24 one had 98.6. The country had not itself gone through a war, but the older group had experienced a couple of bad years of crop losses, plus Russian military had conscripted some young males. Kids used to die young a lot then, anyway.
Jump a hundred years, and we come to the following numbers: 104.5 and 104.9 respectively. I am including one decimal, because numbers are small to illustrate the point: selection hardly visible. It’s just a fact of life that there tends to be a fluctuation. Infant mortality is one of the lowest in the world, and as to the latter (20-24) group, we need to figure in that males tend to die in their teens more than females, which makes the small difference in these numbers bigger.
When we add to that the fact that, in reality India’s some areas do have a tradition of killing girls, even some time after birth. I’m not sure if it’s folklore, because I read it a long time ago in a book about demographics, it is reported that midwives could often just kill the newborn before the initial cry, if they saw it was female. This, according to the same, had the effect to make some mothers give birth out of sight, in the interest of preserving the infant in any case, but their mother-in-law would force the infanticide.
My initial theory would be that while the enlightenment values played out strongly, creating some of the earlies female suffrages, high literacy and altogether became ever more liberal in its values, in southern parts of Europe the Catholic Church’s proscription of contraception (of which condom is the most predictable) and discouragement of girls’ studies all contribute to the same direction as India’s more blatant discrimination and the Confucian “dragons”. Add to it that in India, it costs less to do a gender test and abort the girl than support and “marry her off” as the terrible phrase is, and there you have it: Cheap means, little education.
I will try to find the recent article (somewhere?) I recently read, that analysed the fertility rates in developing countries. It made a strong case that the best way to avoid both astronomical birth rate (fast population growth) and discrimination against females is to educate women, starting as young as possible; while that education was a strong predictor of lower rates of birth w/ low abortion numbers and discrimination against females, at the same time economic growth did not predict it reliably. They even offered cases where birth rates tended remain at 7 to 9 children per women, higher economic growth had only lead to a population growth outpacing economic one (better medicine available, with stubbornly high poverty).
Mind you, in India, abortions where illegal in most states until fairly recently, when they lifted some restrictions to them, they made gender-predictive testing illegal, nationally if my memory isn’t completely failing.
So, we always come back to education, education, education. Nordic Statistical Yearbook 2001 reported that as a whole, Nordic countries have highest birth rate in Europe, while below U.S. In Finland, birth rate has grown each year since, 2011 being highest in 40 years. Education is expensive, but it tends to come back in other ways. It has its drawbacks, though: And educated and fairly well-off populace is more difficult to control. ;)