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.
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“Feminized Western culture continues to wonder why boys who will not act like girls are so “dysfunctional,” a prejudice the Economist seems to share”. Grondelski covers the complex dynamics in the perverse war against masculinity. Men who want to be men are judged toxic, a poisonous aberration from being sweet, passive, deferring to others.
Unfortunately, the Christian revelation in Christ has mistaken the gentle, spiritual demeanor with the feminine. Indeed, there’s a reason the male is XY rather than YY. If the latter he would be the aggressive brute. Consequently, it’s the Christian revelation well conveyed that teaches men how to be men, kind, gentle, strong and assertive when called for. There’s a balance. He finds that in accord with natural law in a woman, his other self whom he loves yet does not become. Whereas our culture has perverted manhood into becoming womanish. Women happy with their femininity hate this perversion in men.
As John Paul II asserted, and Grondelski articulates men and women. male and female cannot be reduced to commodities in our amoral cannibalistic culture. A welcome dynamic for addressing these issues with the public is the notable calibre of young men entering seminaries.
Should read: Unfortunately, the Christian revelation in Christ has been misunderstood by many, that gentleness, deference to others, a spiritual demeanor are, or should be attributes of women rather than men.
Does the motivation matter that much, if the end result is girls living? The old people doing the right thing for the wrong reason. That does not upset me.
It DOES matter because we can do the right thing for the wrong reasons: I can be charitable because I am charitable or because I want to blow the trumpet in front of me. Yes, objective charity is done, but the act is morally skewed. But my concern is not just for the moral integrity of the doer, but whether the mentality represents a shift simply to OTHER victims. Will the shift towards “daughter-preference” mean sons might be victims of sex selection abortion, e.g., boys might be seen as more autism or ADD/ADHD-prone? And, in any event, losing the anti-girl bias while maintaining the idea that a child must meet certain standards (OK, we dropped sex but replaced it with, say, physical characteristics or health characteristics) to live means that we still apply a quality rather than sanctity of life criterion to protection of the unborn.
Your concern for the moral integrity of the doer is something that is really the concern of God, not men. If a billionaire gives heavily to charity because he wants public adulation, so what? I think judging people’s motivation to do good is misguided.
I wish to add an improvement to my text: “Grondelski articulates men and women, male and female cannot be reduced to commodities in our amoral [economically] cannibalistic culture”.
I think it’s sad that in today’s American society, boys are expected to act more like girls, and girls are expected to act more like boys, but what exactly does that mean when pretty much all activities are expected to involve both boys and girls (except for figure skating, which weirdly, many Americans feel is a “girls sport”–even though the sport is one of the most physically difficult and demanding sports, and even though some of our greatest American athletic achievement moments came from male figure skaters like Dick Button and Scott Hamilton! But now, many girls don’t want to do a “girls sport” like figure skating–Yikes!) MY daughters are 41 and 29 and are both competitive figure skaters, and so was their late daddy, my beloved husband.
Boys don’t act like girls because they are not meant to. They are not created to become women, but to become men.
Overlooked, here, is the intercultural aspect and a “pluralism” of religions—as between female infanticide in early Arabia and the sex-selective abortion culture of today’s religion of Secular Humanism. Please, more tolerance and building of bridges!
Western culture regresses to an earlier barbaric level to resemble the Arabian “days of ignorance” prior to the coming of Muhammad. In the Qur’an and Hadiths, even Muhammad (!) goes counterculture to prohibit the common practice of burying alive burdensome and unwanted female babies—a practice distinguished only by technology from, say, today’s clinical late-term abortions. “Sacred ground” according to the former arch-priestess Nancy Pelosi (2013): https://www.catholicnewsagency.com/news/27444/catholic-groups-slam-pelosis-claim-that-abortion-is-sacred-ground
In two extended accounts, Muhammad is reduced to tears when hearing of such live burials. Muhammad’s response to the guilty father is recounted: “Sons and daughters are both gifts of God, the Prophet reminded him. Both are equally gifts, and so they should always be treated equally.”
As an adoptive parent whose children are now grown, I am angered by the statement that The Economist reported that “in adoptions, couples pay more for a girl”. This is an ancient slander. In LEGAL adoptions at a reputable agency, one does NOT “PAY” for a child. One may pay required administrative fees, court fees and even on occasion the birthmother’s medical bills, but NEVER for the baby. It isnt legal to do such a thing. And such statements negatively color the whole process of adoption in the minds of people who dont know any better.
My children, whom we adopted, are both boys, now in their 30’s. The first came from a Catholic agency and the second from a private one. In NEITHER case did we PAY for the baby. We were asked if we had any net preference for a girl or boy. ( We did not.) We WERE told that the wait to adopt was shorter for boys. Whether that was because more birth mothers kept their girls or because there was even 30 years ago a preference to adopt girls, I do not know. But in no way was it EVER implied to us that there would be additional fees to adopt a girl. Unless they have proof of some agency enacting such a fee, The Economist should apologize for making such a statement.
For the record, I am thrilled with the men who are my sons. Never having had either a sister nor a daughter, I honestly dont like like I missed a thing.