Posted on 06/21/2002 9:26:44 AM PDT by dead
In greater numbers than ever China's villagers are using inexpensive prenatal scans then abortion to prevent the birth of unwanted daughters and to ensure they will bear a son, recent studies and census data show.
Over the past decade, a time of rapid economic growth, the gap between male and female births only widened, giving China the largest gender disparity among newborns of any country in the world.
In parts of the countryside the imbalance is staggering, with births of as many as 144 boys recorded for every 100 girls.
Decades of communist rule and recent pell-mell development, far from uprooting the male bias in the countryside, have yielded new pressures to have sons.
In this south-eastern region of hamlets, as in much of rural China, daughters move away to their husband's family at marriage, and the Government no longer provides even a pretence of old-age or medical care.
"People around here depend on their sons to provide for them in old age because you can't rely on anyone else," said Zheng Anban, 40, the father of two sons and two daughters, as his wife nodded in agreement.
Although the Government has tried to outlaw the prenatal determination of sex, the procedure is readily available at countless small-town hospitals and the growing number of for-profit maternity clinics. Many will perform ultrasound tests, no questions asked, for as little as the equivalent of $A7.
The issue of China's "missing girls" first caused an outcry in the early 1990s, after the 1990 census found a nationwide ratio of 111 newborn boys to 100 newborn girls.
Debate raged over whether the reported disparity was largely an illusion, the result of under-reporting of female babies by parents evading the one-child birth limit, or the result of widespread abortion and infanticide of girls. But subsequent research indicated the recorded imbalance was largely genuine and was deepening.
By 2000 the recorded disparity in births had grown to a national average of 117 boys for every 100 girls, compared with the international average of about 106 boys to 100 girls.
The New York Times
Men without women
From The Economist print edition
The consequence of family planning
IT HAS been more than 20 years since China implemented its harsh yet effective family-planning policy. By limiting urban couples to a single child and most rural couples to two, China has managed to slow the growth of the world's largest population. Now, however, the government must figure out what to do about the policy's unintended consequence: a huge and potentially destabilising sex imbalance. Statistics just released based on the 2000 census disclose that, in the country as a whole, about 117 boys are born for every 100 girls. The imbalance is extraordinary in some areas, exceeding 135 for 100 in southern Hainan province.
The reasons are easy to fathom. When couples were free to have half a dozen children, there was a natural mix of boys and girls. When limited to one or two, they worked the system to produce sons. At the benign extreme, a girl's birth might simply not be registered, in the hope that next time the couple would produce a male. More worrying is widespread sex-selective abortion. Cheap but effective ultrasound equipment is now available throughout China and, though the practice is illegal, it is routinely used for pre-natal sex determination. The abortion that apparently often follows is devoid of taboo in China and extremely easy to arrange.
All this leads to worries about how society can function without enough women. The prospect of a large surplus of single men in China alarms Valerie Hudson, a professor at Brigham Young University in the United States. In a study to be published in the next issue of Harvard University's journal International Security, she notes that societies with large numbers of unmarried males tend to experience more crime, unrest and violence. While acknowledging that sex imbalance is only one of many factors influencing levels of violence, Miss Hudson points out that the 30m unhappy unmarried men China is likely to have by 2020 could become “kindling for forces of political revolution at home”. There could also be an impact outside China, she says. The government may decide to use the surplus men as a weapon for military adventurism and “actively desire to see them give their lives in pursuit of a national interest”. A terrifying thought indeed.
I don't think they all deserved to be killed either.
I wonder how much that lowers our tax bills?
None of them deserved to be killed. It is not up to us to play God.
Abortion is an evil act and must be ended. It is only when we see the extremes of abortion ... like baby girls being murdered in and out of the womb simply because they are the "wrong" sex ... that people think twice about the system they have wrought.
Regarding Down Syndrome babies, many of which lead relatively "normal" lives (as we define "normal") ... what if they hold the key to the cure for cancer? Or for other genetic deformaties? Or for AIDS? If we kill them all in the womb, we may be dooming our population.
The point is, all babies deserve the right to life. They deserve to be born. It is not our "choice" once conception has occurred. We all have a choice prior to conception. Even Mary had a choice ... she could have said "NO" to the the Archangel Gabriel.
How do you know this?
How do you know this?
I was speaking mostly from personal experience. I have worked at a camp for handicapped kids for 22 years. For the first decade, 90% of the kids were Downs Syndrome children. Gradually that number declined, and currently, there are almost none. The camp is mostly autistic children and kids with various physical disabilities.
Because of privacy rules in the US, there are no stats on reasons for abortions. But in Canada and Great Britian, 95% of fetuses who test positive for Downs (including the false positives) are aborted.
In addition, for every single fetus found to have Downs, four otherwise healthy fetuses are miscarried as a result of the intrusive amniocentisis test.
100,000,000 only sons! Only if they want a revolution in their country.
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