Posted on 06/18/2011 2:26:32 PM PDT by rabscuttle385
Since the late 1970s, 163 million female babies have been aborted by parents seeking sons.
BY JONATHAN V. LAST
Mara Hvistendahl is worried about girls. Not in any political, moral or cultural sense but as an existential matter. She is right to be. In China, India and numerous other countries (both developing and developed), there are many more men than women, the result of systematic campaigns against baby girls. In "Unnatural Selection," Ms. Hvistendahl reports on this gender imbalance...
(snip)
In nature, 105 boys are born for every 100 girls. This ratio is biologically ironclad.
(snip)
Yet today in India there are 112 boys born for every 100 girls. In China, the number is 121—though plenty of Chinese towns are over the 150 mark. China's and India's populations are mammoth enough that their outlying sex ratios have skewed the global average to a biologically impossible 107.
(snip)
What is causing the skewed ratio: abortion...by Ms. Hvistendahl's counting, there have been so many sex-selective abortions in the past three decades that 163 million girls, who by biological averages should have been born, are missing from the world. Moral horror aside, this is likely to be of very large consequence.
(snip)
...such imbalances are portents of Very Bad Things to come. "Historically, societies in which men substantially outnumber women are not nice places to live," she writes. "Often they are unstable. Sometimes they are violent."
(snip)
The economist Gary Becker has noted that when women become scarce, their value increases...But..."this assessment is true only in the crudest sense." A 17-year-old girl in a developing country is in no position to capture her own value. Instead, a young woman may well become chattel, providing income either for their families or for pimps.
(Excerpt) Read more at online.wsj.com ...
Sometimes I think that the Western establishment hasn’t learned from the horrors of the 20th century (eugenics, Marxism, the Holocaust, and so forth).
Or maybe they just don’t care, as long as they maintain their grips on power.
In many parts of the world, being female is a disadvantage. The Middle East is the most egregious exemple, but it’s also the case in other parts of the world.
Liberalism is a “SICK and DEMENTED” Disease!
Note: Title by Ann Coulter with addded discriptors in parenthesis by Poster!
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Actually in almost the entire World EXCEPT in AMERICA so far! But give the DEMORATS time and they will screw Women in America as well!
Lamh Foistenach Abu! 163 missing females. 30 million missing African-Americans. LIberals’ ideas have consequences.
The other women who were lucky enough to avoid being forced into prostitution (to service the broad masses of men) usually lived on farms in rural isolation and did a lot of manual labor.
This was a consequence of a male/female ratio imbalance caused by a high maternal death rate. It was common back in the good old days for women to die earlier than men ~ in greater numbers simply from the consequences of childbirth.
Having an adult man/woman ratio of 1/1 is a modern novelty that's had a run of just over a century, and only in the modern industrialized nations.
It's totally abnormal.
It’s not just abortion that happens to girls in the 3rd world many are born but left to die because they were born female.
Do you have a cite to back that up?
My understanding is that while many young women died in childbirth, many young men died in battle or in dangerous occupations so it evened out.
Ms. Hvistendahl also dredges up plenty of unpleasant documents from Western actors like the FORD FOUNDATION, the UNITED NATIONS and PLANNED PARENTHOOD, showing how they pushed sex-selective abortion as a means of controlling population growth. In 1976, for instance, the medical director of the International Planned Parenthood Federation, Malcom Potts, wrote that, when it came to developing nations, abortion was even better than birth control: "Early abortion is safe, effective, cheap and potentially the easiest method to administer."
The following year another Planned Parenthood official celebrated China's coercive methods of family planning, noting that "persuasion and motivation [are] very effective in a society in which social sanctions can be applied against those who fail to cooperate in the construction of the socialist state."
As early as 1969, the POPULATION COUNCIL's Sheldon Segal was publicly proclaiming the benefits of sex-selective abortion as a means of combating the "population bomb" in the East. Overall Ms. Hvistendahl paints a detailed picture of Western Malthusians pushing a set of terrible policy prescriptions in an effort to road-test solutions to a problem that never actually manifested itself.
____
The usual suspects.
As far as the men dying early, that's in comparison to the women who survived into their 30s and 40s, but warfare wasn't all that big a deal in peasant societies.
War was for gentlemen ~ the wealthy and powerful.
Can't see the correlation.
To somewhat counterbalance the high female death rate in childbirth, there was also a very high male death rate in accidents (no OSHA back then) and war. Most "indigenous" or "traditional" societies were pretty much constantly at war. While major battles with lots of dead guys killed all at the same time were usually rare, it was not at all uncommon for the constant killing in raids and ambushes to add up to a 20% to 50% death rate for men.
In addition, homicide, mostly of men by men, was MUCH higher in most traditional societies, as in 5x to 20x that of the US today.
From what I've been able to find out, most societies did not have a large preponderance of males over females.
You forgot to account for the fact that men are also more likely to die on a battlefield than women, which I think will offset the women dying in childbirth. And although more boys by pure biology are conceived than girls, more boys than girls suffer mishap before birth through a defect. [i.e. that longer extra X chromosome gives the girls a backup gene that boys don’t have.] So when babies are actually born, the ratio is closer to 1/1.
Plus, more women were held as slaves than were men. Some societies, e.g. those in Scandinavia and the Baltics, held all the women as slaves. Women didn't gain any sort of liberties until relatively recently ~ so it shows up in history ~ and in names. Might add that in Scandinavia they actually did something similar to the Iroquois winter walk. That's where the men go away and hunt and fish all winter while the women, children and old people stay at home and live on the surplus saved up in the short summer.
Starting in about the 8th Century the Vikings began just leaving town and making more distant raids. The folks who stayed behind continued to suffer from famine in winter, but in the springtime when the guys came back they had some good stuff to look at. The last famine in Scandinavia occured in the late 1800s, but the last famine in Northern Europe, far to the South, occurred in 1943.
Interestingly enough, women survive famines better than men ~ but in the next generation everybody gets to be a midget proving that nature provides eh!
America in the 1600s and 1700s clearly had a surplus of men over women.
They were, of course, generally the guys who started it.
But, as an example, during most of the Middle Ages the primary way to fight a war was to "ravage" your opponent's territory. This meant burning his farms and killing his peasants. This was really hard on the peasants. Meanwhile the lord hung out in his castle.
Even when this was not a specific war policy, undisciplined armies moving through your village was a disaster.
During the 100 Years War, Normandy lost 3/4 of its population.
In the early modern period, the 30 Years War reduced the population of Germany by somewhere around 50%.
We routinely consider modern wars much more destructive than those of the past, but this is quite untrue on a percentage, as opposed to absolute basis, which is the proper way to compare. Poland, the country with the highest loss of life during the war, lost about 16%. While horrific, this was rather minor in comparison to routine impacts of many earlier wars there and elsewhere.
In WWII Germany lost 8% to 10%. Japan 4% to 5%. USSR 13.5%. USA 0.32%.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_War_II_casualties
Supposedly the Catholic church authorized polygamy as part of the solution to the social welfare disaster and you could have up to 15 wives if you could pay for them.
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