Rod Dreher

Why conservatives hate Gingrich

Freedom to murder baby girls

By Rod Dreher • January 30, 2012, 10:43 PM

According to the highly respected demographer Nicholas Eberstadt, sex-selective abortion is much, much more common than thought. Between 21 and 24 countries (depending on the data used) have a sex ratio at birth (SRB) of at least 107 males born for every 100 females, exceeding the ratio commonly held as natural, about 104 to 100.

These distorted SRBs are found on almost every continent and in societies comprising a wide array of religions and cultures: Catholic Italy and El Salvador, mixed-faith Lebanon and Muslim Libya, traditionally Confucian China and South Korea, traditionally Buddhist Vietnam, diverse India. In each place, parents are ordering sex-selective abortions to have sons—even in countries that ban prenatal gender-determination technology—largely based on the calculation that sons will contribute financially to the family and better provide for them in their old age. It’s the economy, not just cultural mores, that is creating a generation of ghost girls and lost boys.

Feminism is better for some females than for others.

69 Responses to Freedom to murder baby girls

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Mont D. Law says:

January 31, 2012 at 1:10 pm

[People keep mentioning the status of women in these societies, the devaluation of girls, leading to these sex-selective abortions. While there is certainly truth to that, I have to wonder: women are often mistreated and undervalued in Muslim societies, some African ones, and even (to a much lesser degree) Latin American ones; sex-selective abortion is rare, by and large, in these places.]

Except that is not the case, at least in Africa. Where:

[The numbers suggest that while overall mortality rates in Africa are quite high, there is relatively little bias against women in terms of health care, social status and mortality. In other words, although resources are often scarce, there is no bias that the resources are directed primarily towards men.

In Sub-Saharan African, there are a great number of women who work outside of the home. This supports the theory that literacy and “gainful employment” do much to elevate the status of women and reduce the gender-bias mortality.]

http://tinyurl.com/yur4n5

[Sex-selective abortion is not (yet, anyway) a problem among white people — devout Christian, nominally Christian, or secular — or Protestants of any race.]

This just reinforces my point – religion doesn’t have much of anything to do with this and to stop it women need more freedom and control not less.
Mont D. Law says:

January 31, 2012 at 1:16 pm

[Millions of dead baby girls sounds like an outcome to me.]

It is an outcome, one that everyone here would like to change. The discussion is how to change it. You make my point perfectly by the way. You don’t want to change the outcome unless it can be changed using a process you approve of. Even if that process clearly won’t change the outcome.
Mont D. Law says:

January 31, 2012 at 1:30 pm

[Ridicolous. How do you know they are being forced? A lot of women prefer sons.]

I am not sure what you are arguing? That these women are not oppressed? That enthusiastic compliance with oppression makes the oppression less some how?

Does the fact there were Jews who became enthusiastic Kapos make Jews responsible for the Holocaust. Does the fact that there were Slaves who became enthusiastic Mistresses make slaves responsible for slavery?
Dave D, says:

January 31, 2012 at 1:31 pm

Mike, the problem is that while they may not dogmatically support it in all cases, by framing it in terms of choice and autonomy they created this bugbear. Choosing to abort based on sex selection is just as much an autonomous choice as choosing to abort because you are not ready to have a baby so long as it is uncoerced. By uncoerced I mean direct action from a third party-cultural coercion is a minefield for any form of this given the interrelation between the individual society.

Both choices are valid, but to be against sex selection abortions means suddenly yoking reproductive choice back to a higher ideal than personal autonomy: in this case some variation of societal health. This is ironically the argument people use against abortion being legal at all.

Especially since there is no DIRECT harm to a society that sex-selects. There is a lot of projected harm, based on demographic data, but there was a lot of projected harm we’d be living in a soylent green world, with horrific overpopulation. With no direct, but only potential, all they can fall back is on direct coercion-the women are forced to do it. Not doubting many are, but I bet the majority aren’t given the rapid westernization of the east.

I think the only way to be consistent is to frame adoption in terms of autonomy and equality, and abortion as a last-resort thing when direct harm to the health of the mother happens. This isn’t a panacea: keep in mind through IVF it’s just as easy to sex select, but more costly. But sex selection will always be a specter on this, even in the case when a western woman selects for a girl because they already had a boy.

I also agree with Lord Karth’s two projections. I actually think over time we will see a reversal-in Western societies, it will be the girls who become preferred with a relatively smaller male cohort. But again, it’s all in the future.
Mr. Patrick says:

January 31, 2012 at 1:31 pm

Lord Karth writes:
“Not as long as “non-discrimination”—a fancier word for the immoral, pernicious and unworkable concept of Human “Equality”–remains beloved in the hearts of our economic and political elites.”

To implicate egalitarianism as a fault common to despotic, caste-based Asian societies, is a novel observation.
Noah says:

January 31, 2012 at 1:48 pm

Turmarion,

Your fascinating comment has a great dollop of Jared Diamond: interesting, valid observations about the influence of geography on the great arc of history and cultural evolution, marred by modern-day PC squeamishness about discussions of race. While I say that there is some merit to your idea of geography aiding, or hindering, in the development of “cultural dynamism,” there are some big holes.

Most of Europe — in particular, most of the native turf of Germanics and (northern) Slavs — is plains or low hills. On the flip side, the Indian subcontinent has long been the world’s most linguistically diverse region (by some distance), with a dizzying array of “microcultures” (to use your term); India is the birthplace of three different major world religions — Hinduism, Buddhism, and Sikhism — with the largest of these (and to lesser extents, the other two) being, from a European Christian perspective, the world’s most bafflingly complex and mind-numbingly multifaceted. (Your brief, much appreciated clarifications of Hindu beliefs give an inking of the truth of my characterizations). China, on the other hand, is indeed moslty flat, and (outside the peripheral deserts and mountains) ethnically, culturally, and (sort of) linguistically homogenous (AFAIK, the spoken dialects of Chinese vary greatly, but the written language is more or less uniform; in any case, Mandarin is, and has always been, overwhelmingly dominant).

Your thoughts about cultural perceptions of time are intriguing, but still we have the issue of how religious cultures influence mass behavior over generations.

At the risk of going OT with yet another Turmarion-vs.-the-Sailerites battle about race: Saying that Indians and Iranians are Indo-Europeans just like Europeans is like saying “We’re all from Africa, originally.” Clearly millenia of geographic separation and concomitant evolutionary divergence have made these groups distinct races — just as Labradors and dachsunds, while sharing a common caninity, are clearly distinct breeds.

You are right to note that pre-Christian Europeans, Germanic and Greco-Roman, granted women relatively higher status than in Eastern cultures, but I still insist that Christianity improved and reinforced these tendencies. Especially Protestant Christianity: I note for a third time that no historically Protestant country, of any racial composition is mentioned in Eberstadt’s report.
Noah says:

January 31, 2012 at 2:16 pm

I wrote: Sex-selective abortion is not (yet, anyway) a problem among white people — devout Christian, nominally Christian, or secular — or Protestants of any race.

Mont D. Law responded: This just reinforces my point – religion doesn’t have much of anything to do with this and to stop it women need more freedom and control not less.

You are ignoring the glaring reality that these gender imbalances are quite extreme among Sikhs, Confucians, Hindus, and Buddhists (roughly in that order) while much, much rarer and less acute among Muslims (known neither for wealth, nor respect for women and girls, nor defense of individual liberty), and rarer and less acute still among historically Christian societies (even in the Third World).

As for the link you provided, did you not understand that I said sex-selective abortion was NOT widespread in Africa? Furthermore, the maps in the link show gender ratios in countries’ total populations, not just among newborns or infants; these ratios are affected by other factors besides sex-selective abortion. Your link does not counter anything I have written.
Franklin Evans says:

January 31, 2012 at 2:26 pm

“Feminism is the radical notion that women are people.”
–Cheris Kramarae and Paula Treichler

How feminists in any given place and time act on this “notion” is a large part of the point. It should be easy for any observer, especially in hindsight, to see where this notion fails to overcome the power of the “local” patriarchy.

Noah, I was wondering, with no sarcasm intended: How do you account for the early concept of Original Sin and its being pinned on Eve? There was a long period of time when her heirs had no chance to overcome that “inheritance” where it was used as the sole and final reason to keep them as dependent chattels of their male masters.

Christianity contributed many things to modern civilization. Characterizing them in any absolute fashion is, with respect, rather disingenuous.
philosopher says:

January 31, 2012 at 4:06 pm

Surely you do not mean to commit so bald-faced a version of the fallacy of equivocation as this:
“My point, though, is that it has been a non-negotiable tenet of (most of) the pro-choice movement that nobody has a right to dictate to a woman the terms under which she may exercise her “right” to choose. That right is absolute. If that is so, then nobody has the right to tell the morally autonomous mother that she may not exercise her right if she is doing so for the sake of ending the unborn life of a female.”

I don’t doubt that some people hold a version of views like this. But mostly what you find in the pro-choice side of things are people thinking that women should have an absolute “right” to determine their reproductive lives _in the sense that they should not be coerced into living those lives other than they choose_; but there is no widespread commitment at all to the idea that women should have such a “right” _in the sense that all such decisions are beyond critique or moral evaluation_. These are both perfectly standard uses of “right”, but obviously a right of the first sort entails no such rights of the second sort. E.g., one has no right, in the second sense, to cheat on one’s fiance; but there is no state-enforceable requirement not to do so.

So, no, I’m still not seeing that you’ve got a coherent angle on feminism here. As many folks on the thread have pointed out, you’re just point 180 degrees in the wrong direction to try to make anti-feminist hay out of this unfortunate phenomenon.
Noah says:

January 31, 2012 at 4:06 pm

Franklin,

Turmarion and I were talking about the relative status of women in Europe compared to the Subcontinent and the Orient. Yes, yes, women in Europe did not — before, say, the Enlightenment, or whatever line you want to draw — have the status that they have today. Still, compared to those other cultural regions, women have been relatively better off for millenia.

My two cents on the Eve business is that, while containing a kernel of truth, it is exaggerated by modern historians with modern political agendas. I have read about Muslim visitors to Europe in medieval and Renaissance times noting (unfavorably, from the Muslim perspective) the relative liberty and deference afforded Christian women compared to Muslim.
Noah says:

January 31, 2012 at 4:08 pm

Correction:

women have been relatively better off in Europe for millenia.
Lord Karth says:

January 31, 2012 at 4:24 pm

Mr. Patrick writes: ““Not as long as “non-discrimination”—a fancier word for the immoral, pernicious and unworkable concept of Human “Equality”–remains beloved in the hearts of our economic and political elites.”

To implicate egalitarianism as a fault common to despotic, caste-based Asian societies, is a novel observation.

There is more than one way to perdition, sir.

Your servant,

Lord Karth
Franklin Evans says:

January 31, 2012 at 5:01 pm

Thanks, Noah. As a discussion point, I suggest we (all of us) stay a bit more specific in our comparisons of the status of women. Feminism is a distinctly modern movement, and from my POV the further back in time you go, the less relevant your data becomes.

As a side note — being at once intended as mild sarcasm and with some cynicism, so grain of salt time — modern (last two centuries) rhetoric about the “place” of women has been primarily couched in Christian terminology. The Eve as “original sinner” theme was there, if not so stridently as in previous times and places. I’ll qualify that, more seriously, as a description of the “style” of patriarchal hegemony of those modern times, and not as a specific indictment of Christian doctrinal attitudes of the present.
Mont D. Law says:

January 31, 2012 at 5:07 pm

[As for the link you provided, did you not understand that I said sex-selective abortion was NOT widespread in Africa?]

Yes I understood that. The link I provided pointed out that in Africa gender equality in resource distribution was common so you would not expect a skewed ratio whatever religon is being practised.

[You are ignoring the glaring reality that these gender imbalances are quite extreme among Sikhs, Confucians, Hindus, and Buddhists (roughly in that order) while much, much rarer and less acute among Muslims (known neither for wealth, nor respect for women and girls, nor defense of individual liberty), and rarer and less acute still among historically Christian societies (even in the Third World).]

I am not ignoring this point. I just don’t agree Christianity has a huge role in determing which societies will practice abortion for reasons of sex selection. As the report we are discussing clearly states:

[The ten societies with biologically unnatural SRBs examined thus far represent most of the world’s major religious and cultural traditions: Confucianism, Buddhism, Hinduism, Islam, and Christianity.]

And:

[But it is important to recognize that the phenomenon is also now evident in over half a dozen European countries as well. Albania’s officially reported 2004 SRB was 113. In Serbia and Montenegro — portions of the former Yugoslavia — 2008 SRBs were 109 and 108, respectively. And in the nominally Catholic-majority populations of Austria, Italy, Portugal, and Spain, officially reported 2008 SRBs were all 107.]
Noah says:

January 31, 2012 at 6:00 pm

Mont D. Law,

I repeat that all of the historically Catholic countries mentioned by Eberstadt, taken collectively, represent only a fraction of global Catholicism (about a fifth, I think), and Serbia is only a sliver of historic Orthodoxy. The gender imbalances shown in most of these countries are not nearly as bad as in the Dharmic Belt. India, China, and the neighboring Asian countries mentioned in the report do represent overwhelming majorities of the world’s Confucians, Hindus, Sikhs, and Buddhists, and the imbalances are quite extreme in them.
Julien Peter Benney says:

January 31, 2012 at 8:04 pm

Interesting look, Rod and “Tumarion”. It is striking that the traditionally Abrahamic Caucasian republics of Armenia, Azerbaijan and Georgia have had SRBs as high as 120, in addition to those of the Dharmic Belt.

As I see it, sex ratios at birth are further evidence that the extreme resource devaluation resulting throughout the world outside Australia and sub-Saharan Africa selects for a population consisting exclusively of males. Since these nations do not have flat, frost-free land upon which agriculture can be comparatively advantageous, nor vast resources of key lithophile metals like aluminium, titanium, manganese and iron, they are forced into competing for a tiny range of economic activities by mainly political means.

Such intense competition tends to eliminate the nurturing and motherly qualities of women and tends to favour extreme present-orientation, because one country’s people may lose the industries they have gained very swiftly and have insufficient new ones to replace them. (This explains such developments as the EU and euro, since the interests of all of Eurasia, the non-tropical Americas and New Zealand are basically the same and they would obviously have more power vis-à-vis warm, mineral- and land-rich Australia and sub-Saharan Africa as a union). With women’s traditional nurturing jobs taken over by machines (weaving etc.) or medicine, there is effectively selection for an extremely high (almost infinite) ratio of male to females, and this selection is strongest in the hyper-crowded Enriched/Tropical Transition Zone between the Indus and Taiwan, where hot climates, abundant water and very young constantly forming soils could support rural populations denser than Australian cities.

So, there may be “natural” selection at work in these un-natural SRBs. To say that the Dharmic religions are to blame is a bit dubious, Noah, since the areas where they are most intensely practiced in the Himalayan valleys do not show such imbalances, for one thing.
Noah says:

January 31, 2012 at 10:43 pm

Julien Peter Benney,

First, I did not say that sex-selective abortions, and the resulting sex imbalances among newborns, are completely unknown in historically Christian and Muslim societies; I said, rather, that the problem was much, much less common and severe in such societies, in comparison with Dharmic and Confucian lands.

Second, I am not sure what you mean when you write: the areas where they are most intensely practiced in the Himalayan valleys do not show such imbalances. That is not my reading of the map provided in Eberstadt’s report. The far eastern Indian states — the ones bordering Bangladesh on three sides, as well as Burma and (for one state) China — show a much lesser degree of gender imbalance, and a few seem to have hardly a problem at all; not coincidentally, IMHO, these states have large Christian and/or Muslim minorities (or Christian majorities, in a few states). Look also at Kerala, on India’s southern tip, or Goa, on the west-central coast: both areas have large and long-standing Christian communities (in Kerala’s case, going back to the early Church), as well as large Muslim minorities, and relatively little problem with sex imbalance. There are some heavily Hindu states in the east-central part of the country in which sex imbalance is much less of an issue; two of them, Chhattisgarh and Jharkhand, are dirt-poor and underdeveloped even by Indian standards (and thus pregnant villagers may not have access to sonograms or abortions). These states are clearly the exception, not the rule, among the heavily Hindu and Sikh regions (and I’ll repeat that India’s worst state for this issue is Punjab, bastion of Sikhism).
Julien Peter Benney says:

January 31, 2012 at 11:38 pm

Noah,

I’m really sorry! What I was saying is that sex-selective abortion is quite probably an evolutionary response to dense populations for whom their historic resource of soils that are in geological terms utter freaks in terms of chemical fertilty can not longer economically sustain them.

I was also saying that the strongly Buddhist “trans-Himalayan” regions of Tibet and most of Ladakh do not appear to show sex-selective abortion to any extent, though this may of course be a function of lack of development and lower population density rather than belief.

On a broad global scale areas where Dharmic religions dominated tend to correspond to those with heavy tropical rainfalls that, with the aid of soils built from the Himalayas allowed for extremely dense rural populations compared to Europe or the Middle East where crop growth occurs at cooler temperatures. In these monsoonal regions, small-scale cultivators are in an even worse economic position from globalisation than peasants in Europe, and as I tried to explain earlier, the forces of competition tend to devalue the “feminine” side of culture in these regions even more than in Europe, North America and New Zealand. Under such conditions one has what could be called selection for a ratio of males to females that is extremely high to the point of being incalculable.
Hector says:

February 1, 2012 at 12:28 am

Noah,

As an (ethnic) Indian (and a Christian, for the record), I’d like to say your analysis of the state-by-state patterns is interesting. I think religion quite possibly does play a role here. As I understand it (and a good part of my family is Hindu) abortion isn’t viewed with the same horror by most Hindus as it has been, historically, by Christians, Muslims, Jews, and Zoroastrians. I’d also say that the northwest of India (including the Punjab) is notorious for patriarchal, anti-women values, and is much worse in that regard than the east or the South.

The extreme eastern states are very interesting, but I’d also caution that they’re culturally very different from the rest of India, and have traditionally had more in common with Burma or the hill tribes of Southeast Asia than with most of the rest of the country.