This article originally appeared in Democracy: A Journal of Ideas, Summer 2006.
Three biopolitical regions are emerging in the twenty-first
century. First is an axis of inequality, including India, China,
Taiwan, Pakistan, Afghanistan, and parts of nearby East and Asia,
which now have approximately 105 men per 100 women, with ratios among
younger cohorts running as high as 118:100. Second is an axis of
decline, sweeping in almost all of Europe along with Japan and South
Korea, where fertility rates — the average number of children
born to an adult woman — are well below the replacement rate of
2.1 required for a stable population. In a third group of countries,
fertility presently hangs around the replacement rate: the United
States, major Latin American countries like Brazil, Argentina, and
Chile, and even giant Indonesia are all somewhere in this band.
What do people in modernizing cultures do when they take
reproduction out of the realm of luck and nature and put it under
self-conscious control? In much of Asia, the answer has turned out to
be that they have sons. For those conditioned by U.S. abortion
politics to think of reproductive choice as always and entirely
pro-woman, this is a disconcerting irony. Even more troubling is that
millions of individual reproductive choices produce a massive
demographic distortion — scores of millions of men with no one
to court, love, or marry.
Nobel laureate Amartya Sen first drew attention to what he called
“missing women” in 1990 .… [A]lthough reliable
figures are hard to come by no one seriously disputes that
sex-selective abortion and a bias toward sons in feeding and medical
care contribute a great deal to Asia’s sex ratios. Increases in
the share of young men in the population have come with diffusion of
inexpensive techniques for prenatal sex-identification. While aborting
fetuses based on sex has been illegal in India since 1994, enforcement
relies mainly on voluntary reporting by prenatal clinics and is all
but meaningless. The first criminal sentence handed out under the act
was in March 2006, and there are presently 37 criminal actions as
process in a country of more than one billion people. Indian ads for
prenatal sex-determination (which are technically illegal under the
same law) trumpet how much less the procedure costs than a
daughter’s dowry — a clear reference to the motive of
ensuring that a family has sons. A study in one hospital in
India’s Punjab state found in the 1980s and 1990s that almost
14% of mothers of sons admitted having sexed their fetuses —
with reticence that may suggest underreporting. The comparable figure
for mothers of girls was 2%. Presumably, the rest of the female
fetuses were aborted.
