Gendercide

I read the most interesting article in the Economist the other day:

The war on baby girls: Gendercide | The Economist

4 Mar 2010 ... Killed, aborted or neglected, at least 100m girls have disappeared and the number is rising.

After International Women's Day, it really hit home: how much our lives are affected by our gender, and how much our lives are controlled by societal morays around this issue.

We know, of course, of the bias of certain extremist religious groups that do not want to educate girls. We know about the glass ceiling in big business.

Many reputable services agencies and NGOs understand the importance of teaching women, because then you educate a family. In cultures, as in some African countries, where it is acceptable for older men to rape young girls, it results in the spread of AIDS.  NGOs are going in and teaching the girls to demand condom use. Anti-discrimination laws and media campaigns are making a dent in some countries.

But, Gendercide, is the systematic choice to abort baby girls in, for example, China and northern India. China, with their former one-child policy (now 30+ yrs old: established in 1979), depended upon boys to inherit family responsibilities, as well as property, while girls marry and go to the husband's family. The anchor of the birth of a boy meant that elders knew they would be looked after in their senior years.

This magazine cites these reasons for gendercide:

1. The ancient Asian preference for sons
2. A modern desire for smaller families
3. New, inexpensive technology that identifies the gender of a fetus.
4. Declining fertility rates.

For $12, a family can have an unltrasound in China and choose to abort a female. In their new economy, this is affordable. In pre-Communist China, families (rich or poor) would have 4 or more children and could expect a boy somewhere along the line. Over the years stories have abounded about baby girls disappearing.

In India, where dowries still exist, families are importing women. And the bride-price is lowering. In South Korea there are more interracial marriages.

In China and South Korea, the WHO tells us that suicide rates amongst women, are the highest in the world.

The consequences of this gender war is that gender ratio of a natural ratio of 105 boys to 100 girls, are skewed to 124;100 is some places. The natural ratio works since baby boys are more fragile than their female peers. This means that the anchor of a wife and family, for young men, is no longer there. Without a 'stake in society' (The worldwide war on baby girls, p. 77) young men are different than those with a vested interest in values. Young men are responsible for more crime and violence than women, and in China and India social acceptance depends upon being married and having children.

Consequences ensue: crime rates have increased in China, bride abductions, trafficking of women, rap and prostitution are on the rise.

I am grateful to live in a country in which my granddaughter will have choices: education, career, family, rural or urban lifestyle. A little girl, taught well by her parents, who uses the word 'Yes', rather than the ubiquitous 'Yeah', or 'No problem', and understands the values we bashed into her mother (just kidding!). I have high hopes that she will be whomever she wants to be, with freedoms that go unrealized in many countries. She will be able to pursue the answers to the questions she ponders.
Oh, Canada!
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Gendercide Watch

Confronts gender-selective atrocities against men and women worldwide. Includes a growing database of historical and contemporary case-studies of gendercide