Gendercide

[cali]

Killed, aborted or neglected, at least 100m girls have disappeared—and the number is rising

Mar 4th 2010 | From The Economist print edition

IMAGINE you are one half of a young couple expecting your first child in a fast-growing, poor country. You are part of the new middle class; your income is rising; you want a small family. But traditional mores hold sway around you, most important in the preference for sons over daughters. Perhaps hard physical labour is still needed for the family to make its living. Perhaps only sons may inherit land. Perhaps a daughter is deemed to join another family on marriage and you want someone to care for you when you are old. Perhaps she needs a dowry.

Now imagine that you have had an ultrasound scan; it costs $12, but you can afford that. The scan says the unborn child is a girl. You yourself would prefer a boy; the rest of your family clamours for one. You would never dream of killing a baby daughter, as they do out in the villages. But an abortion seems different. What do you do?

For millions of couples, the answer is: abort the daughter, try for a son. In China and northern India more than 120 boys are being born for every 100 girls. Nature dictates that slightly more males are born than females to offset boys’ greater susceptibility to infant disease. But nothing on this scale.

For those who oppose abortion, this is mass murder. For those such as this newspaper, who think abortion should be “safe, legal and rare” (to use Bill Clinton’s phrase), a lot depends on the circumstances, but the cumulative consequence for societies of such individual actions is catastrophic. China alone stands to have as many unmarried young men—“bare branches”, as they are known—as the entire population of young men in America. In any country rootless young males spell trouble; in Asian societies, where marriage and children are the recognised routes into society, single men are almost like outlaws. Crime rates, bride trafficking, sexual violence, even female suicide rates are all rising and will rise further as the lopsided generations reach their maturity

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http://www.economist.com/displayStory.cfm?Story_ID=15606229&fsrc=nlw|hig|02-25-2010|editors_highlights

[Captain Hilts]

1. It's still a man's, man's world. nt

[Kurt_and_Hunter]

2. And the result will be war

For instance, China is going to invade Vietnam someday, IMO.

Surplus males result in war.

[cali]

3. in a nutshell, that's it.

and it won't be long.

[Kurt_and_Hunter]

4. And it's one of those elegant mathematical solutions...

Male-heavy X invades Y. The war reduces the number of males in both X and Y.

Whichever side wins absorbs the surplus females of the loser.

The result is, after an incredible amount of suffering and destruction, the reassertion of the naturally occurring birth ratio.

It is stable for a reason.

On a societal level a male-glut makes females more valuable but it takes a while to play out. Eventually parents realize that they can marry their daughter into a richer family than they could have previously hoped and provide for their old age that way, while parents who chose sons to provide for them see their sole-support drafted into the army. Now daughters look like a better deal.

And in a time of major war your chance of getting a grand-child from a daughter is much higher than from a son.

(A somewhat overlooked area of evolutionary psychology is that the interests of parents are not always the best interests of children. But only parents establish law and tradition. And by the time the children become parents their interests have shifted to the child-owning side.)

[Igel]

8. Don't overlook the multiplier effect.

If you're allowed more than one wife at a time, that vastly increases the number of single males available for slaughter detail. Sometimes stability for your culture can have the added bonus of producing instability for nearby cultures.

Or the culture knock-on effect: If you need to have a dowry to give to the bride, plus a home, plus a job, and you have no way of getting them, that means you're single and available for slaughter detail. In fact, the sheer shame of it can drive you to volunteer.

[proteus_lives]

6. That's right.

It's one the main reasons that China's fragile house of cards may collapse in the coming decades.

[deaniac21]

5. daughters can't be aborted. they are a fetus.

[cali]

7. oh, for fuck's sake

talk about an inane comment.

[deaniac21]

9. that was the intent