Letting girls be born for all the wrong reasons

The Economist recently lauded the fact that sex selection abortions seem to be on the decline. “The noxious practice of aborting girls simply for being girls has become dramatically less common.”

Earlier ultrasounds and modern genetic testing now let parents know the sex of their baby. This led to a phenomenon of some parents seeking out abortion because their baby was the “wrong” sex. And the “wrong” sex was usually female, especially if the girl came before the boy.

The phenomenon had certain cultural and demographic contours: it was most prominent among parents from East and South Asia. The Communist dictatorship’s “one-child policy” promoted it in mainland China. If you could only have one baby, you did not want to “waste” the authorization on a daughter. It has why mainland China’s sex ratio is skewed. In a normal society, there are about 105 girls born per 100 boys (because girls survive better). China now claims the ratio is 112/100, down from an average high of 118/100, but skewed in some places to 130/100.

But even where government control or baby quotas were not enforced, cultural biases militated against girls. The problem might not even be sex as much as birth order: firstborn sons enjoyed priority.

As in the ancient world, where Roman fathers could exercise their version of “post-birth abortion” (that is, abandonment of newborns), an excess of daughters can still be seen as economically threatening. Girls usually export familial assets in the form of dowries, while boys import wealth into the family. In traditional China, what abortion today accomplishes was previously (and in some areas probably still) done by infanticide.

The Economist, therefore, was pleased that “boy preference” is waning. However, it has been estimated that, in the period 2000-2016, there should have been about 24 million more girls born than actually were. This means, in a place like China, that men are challenged to find marriageable women.

The magazine attributes the change of declining “boy preference’ to disappearing “sexist ideas” that valued men more. The truth, it opines, is that it also eases “the harms caused by surplus men.” Chinese men without women to marry commit more crimes, including rape. But even in the West, The Economist reports, there’s currently a growing bias for girls. Befitting the magazine’s name, it notes that in adoptions “couples pay extra for a girl” and when they use in vitro fertilization, “women increasingly opt for daughters.”

Will now possible early sex detection drive renewed sex-selection abortion, in either gender direction, facilitated by resorting to early-term pharmaceutical abortifacients?

The rationales for daughter preference are mixed. Some think girls are easier to raise, an assumption the journal seems to agree with. “A surplus of single women is unlikely to become physically abusive. Indeed, you might speculate that a mostly female world would be more peaceful and better run.”

Some motives are implicitly scorned because of their cultural assumptions: does an aging population want more daughters because girls take care of elderly parents?

And, yes, boys are falling behind academically and socially, with more girls reaching higher educational attainments. As more girl bosses shatter more glass ceilings, a certain worldview may prefer more fully functional females rather than dysfunctional dudes. The bottom line is that it is good that “gendercide” against girls seems to be abating, “[b]ut do not assume that what comes next will be simple or trouble-free.”

What to say? The Economist seems to have its own biases. But, as they are liberal, they’re not questioned.

First, the ongoing war on boys. It’s different from the gendercide against girls, but likewise toxic. The question is: do you want your poison in one quick dose or by extended release? Feminized Western culture continues to wonder why boys who will not act like girls are so “dysfunctional,” a prejudice the Economist seems to share. “Tailoring policies to help struggling boys need not mean disadvantaging girls, any more than prescribing glasses for someone with bad eyesight hurts those with 20/20 vision.” The problem is that no small number of people think in practice that being and acting like a boy is itself the problem. Maleness is not the sexual equivalent of astigmatism.

Second, given the UK Parliament’s practical expansion of abortion in June (The Economist is a British journal), where exactly does the magazine think the problem lies: that the baby was aborted or that the aborted baby was female? Because the dirty little secret has been that abortion advocates consistently oppose bans on sex-selection abortions. Abortion has to be “available.” Where they twist themselves into logical knots is squaring the conviction that “choice” is inviolable (and, therefore, usually immune from moral evaluation) but maybe in this case, the “choice” wasn’t so good.

The paradox has always been that what was declared “essential for women’s rights” explicitly gleaned a lethal harvest of no small number of women. Many simply rationalized that harvest as “potential women.”

The truth is that whenever human beings intervene with wish lists in reproduction, they ineluctably transform childbearing from “gift” into “project.” Former Paris Archbishop Michel Aupetit—himself a physician and bioethicist—dubbed it the “parental project”. When a child becomes a product, subject to external “quality” checks according to parental preferences, the unspoken premise being “quality failures” can be throwaways.

Once upon a time, such parental wish lists were merely dreams. “I’d like a boy who’ll be a great football player.” “I’d like a girl with blue eyes and blonde hair.” Today, such wish lists are real—and a real threat because modern technology and genetic interventions increasingly render those desiderata deliverables. Recent developments in prenatal gene editing might be used for therapeutic and/or eugenic purposes. And, in the laissez-faire world of The Economist, who is to say the parent, like the customer, isn’t always right?

The problem with The Economist’s praise for the demise of “boy preference” is not that sexist gendercide is down, but because it may be down for all the wrong reasons. And it is down because different prejudices and assumptions displaced earlier ones. It has not declined because we categorically reject seeing a baby as a product. It is not down because we accept the inalienable right of every child from the moment of conception to be loved as he is, irrespective of anybody else’s expectations.

Karol Wojtyła, the future John Paul II, insisted there were two ways to approach a person: love him or use her. Marrying Kant’s categorical imperative (“a person is always an end, never a means”) with the Bible (“love your neighbor”), he insisted a truly human society can only opt for love of a person. Bottom line, The Economist sees babies and their sex as useful.