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Where are all the missing girls?
29 March 2006
The demographers call it the sex ratio, or the gender imbalance problem, others talk about a surplus on sons, but the reality is that many females are aborted or killed by infanticide, or left to die simply because they are female.
There is a longstanding denigration of females in certain cultures, especially in Asia. In countries such as China, India and South Korea there is a very serious shortage of women.
In China there is a very longstanding tradition of son preference. In the Book of Songs, a Chinese poetry book dated around 1000 BC, we find the following advice given to new parents:
When a son is born
Let him sleep on a bed,
Clothe him with fine clothes,
And give him jade to play with ....
When a daughter is born,
Let her sleep on the ground,
Wrap her in common wrappings,
And give her broken tiles for playthings.
What a contrast there is to this attitude in the Bible, see Proverbs 31: 10 -31 where the wife of noble character is worth far more than rubies, she is clothed with dignity, her children arise and call her blessed and the woman who fears the Lord is to be praised.
China's totalitarian regime has also embarked, since the late 1970s, on the notorious one child policy. This being done under the mistaken notion that population control was the solution to their dreadful economic woes. Many will say today, that it has worked, China is now much better off than forty years ago. However China is still much poorer than Taiwan, Hong Kong and Singapore. These are all Chinese countries. China has massive natural resources, the others have nothing. The reason China is poor is because of Communism with it's economic and political isolationism, militarism, corruption, Mao's failed socio-economic experiment, etc.
So the draconian one child policy has had another terrible consequence. For many years there has been approximately 121 boys born for every 100 baby girls. The normal ratio is 105 boys born for every 100 girls. This seem to be God's way of balancing things out. Male infants have a higher death rate than female infants. So at adulthood you end up with an almost equal ratio of men and women.
In China as part of the one child policy, ultrasound machine were made available in massive numbers, so that population control police could check that the stainless steel IUD rings were in place in all the women of child bearing age who did not have a birth permit. These machines can also be used to check the sex of the child. If a woman has her birth permit gets pregnant, finds she has a girl, she can abort and hope to get pregnant with a male child, while the birth permit is still valid. This saves the trouble of having to carry out infanticide after the birth of a girl. As there is no real pension system in China, the Chinese parents must have a boy to look after them in old age. It is simply a matter of survival in old age.
In India there is a similar tradition of son preference. There is also the dowry system where the parents of a girl have to pay the prospective in-laws money when she weds their son. Laws have been passed to make it illegal tell women the sex of their baby by ultrasound. This year one Indian doctor and his assistant have been sent to jail for two years for revealing the sex of a female foetus and agreeing to abort her. In 2003 a court in Southern India sentenced three people to life imprisonment for killing a new -born girl. This was the first time this state has handed down a life sentence for female infanticide.
The exact scale of the problem has been very hotly debated since the 1990s. Some estimate state that there are 100 million missing females in India and China so far. Two political scientists have recently publish a book claiming that offspring selection could lead to war. This new book, Bare Branches: Security Implications of Asia's Surplus Male population (MIT Press), Valerie Hudson & Andrea den Boer, warns that the spread of sex selection is giving rise to a generation of restless young men who will find no marriage partner. History, biology, and sociology all suggest that these " surplus males" will generate high levels of crime and social disorder, the authors say. Even worse, they continue to warn, is the possibility that the governments of India and China will build up huge armies in order to provide a safety valve for the young men's aggressive energies.
These apocalyptic forecasts garnered a great deal of attention when the scholars first presented them, in the journal International Security, in 2002. " The thing that excited me about this research is how fundamental demography is," says David Courtwright, a professor of history at the University of North Florida and author of Violent land: Single men and social Disorder From the frontier to the Inner city (Harvard University press., 1966), a study of sex ratios and murder rates in American society. He argues that violent crime in the United States has been concentrated in areas with high sex ratios, like the old western frontier, and areas with low sex ratios, like contemporary urban ghettos, from which significant numbers of men are " missing " because of imprisonment. Such demographic considerations should be central to any serious study of crime and disorder, he says. " Even if you don't buy their fear about war, " he says of Ms. Hudson and Ms. Den Boer, " certainly you can accept their predictions about crime and instability ".
I have personally experienced the violent nature of Australian mining town in the outback where there are many single men. The same was the case during the early convict times when there were many unattached men.
For students of the End Times there is a very interesting passage in Rev. 16:12. "The sixth angel poured out his bowl on the great river Euphrates and its water was dried up to prepare the way for the Kings of the East". There may come a day when millions of young men, from Asia will be conscripted into their army, with one goal of finding a bride, and will end up at Armageddon (Rev. 16:16)
For the past eleven years I have lobbied at the United Nations for the Society for the Protection of Unborn Children (SPUC) and often talk to delegates about how population control is not needed and even harmful. If you would like me to speak in your Church on this issue or other pro-life matters please contact me at - petercsmith@hotmail.com.
- See also A Dangerous Surplus of Sons?
