Monday, June 28, 2004
Bride famine arrives in India
There's a powerful unwritten law of government called "the law of unexpected consequences". It is now being exacted in India, where they are reaping the consequences of a high abortion rate.
Indian social scientists are predicting a rise in sexual violence and wife-sharing because 40 million aborted girls are missing from the population. It is estimated that 5 million girls are aborted each year. "In Haryana [state] a whole generation of young men is failing to find wives because a quarter of the female population has simply disappeared," says the London Times.
"All over India, since the 1980s when the country was flooded with cheap ultrasound technology, this mobile killing machine, wielded by doctors with no ethics, has been doing its lethal work," the Times reports. "Villages may not have clean drinking water or electricity, but they have access to ultrasound tests. Some clinics in towns load the machine onto a van, along with a generator, and go to remote towns offering sex-selection services. In some villages no girl has been born for years."
Women's groups have reported cases of fraternal polyandry. A
young woman is formally married to one man but shared with his
brothers. Police in Uttar Pradesh also say that there have been five cases of fratricide in the past year motivated by sexual jealousy or rivalry. (London Times, Jun 22 2004. This article is unfortunately only available online by subscription.)
The United Nations has been urging all countries for years to make abortion more readily available, and has heavily criticised those which have held back. Now we are starting to see the results.
Nearly every developed country is having a population crisis, as the fertility rate plummets. In New Zealand, it is down to 1.9, which is 10% below replacement level, and falling. The impact of this will start to be felt in another 30 years, when Statistics NZ expects deaths to outpace births for the first time. Last year, I asked Stats NZ what the fertility rate would be if we had not aborted 17,400 babies. The answer was : 2.5
In another article on the same day, The Times notes that in China and India there are now 150 million more men than women, a situation which poses dangers for the world that stem from a testosterone-heavy society.
Five years ago the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences in Beijing calculated that one Chinese man in six was unlikely to find a female partner. That's about 111 million unattached males. The excess of young men over women in India is almost as vast. In China now, 120 male babies are born for every 100 females. In some Indian villages the figure is nearer 150. The average figure around the globe is 105. In short, large areas of Asia seem to be going through a vast demographic shift that is unprecedented in history. A new book which looks at the potential problems, Bare Branches, has the subtitle, "The Security Implications of Asia's Surplus Male Population", which has caused a real stir. It hints ominously at the main thrust of the argument -that "the masculinisation of Asia's sex ratios" is likely to lead to "inherently unstable" societies that are high in crime and violence and a potential threat to neighbouring countries as well.
There's a powerful unwritten law of government called "the law of unexpected consequences". It is now being exacted in India, where they are reaping the consequences of a high abortion rate.
Indian social scientists are predicting a rise in sexual violence and wife-sharing because 40 million aborted girls are missing from the population. It is estimated that 5 million girls are aborted each year. "In Haryana [state] a whole generation of young men is failing to find wives because a quarter of the female population has simply disappeared," says the London Times.
"All over India, since the 1980s when the country was flooded with cheap ultrasound technology, this mobile killing machine, wielded by doctors with no ethics, has been doing its lethal work," the Times reports. "Villages may not have clean drinking water or electricity, but they have access to ultrasound tests. Some clinics in towns load the machine onto a van, along with a generator, and go to remote towns offering sex-selection services. In some villages no girl has been born for years."
Women's groups have reported cases of fraternal polyandry. A
young woman is formally married to one man but shared with his
brothers. Police in Uttar Pradesh also say that there have been five cases of fratricide in the past year motivated by sexual jealousy or rivalry. (London Times, Jun 22 2004. This article is unfortunately only available online by subscription.)
The United Nations has been urging all countries for years to make abortion more readily available, and has heavily criticised those which have held back. Now we are starting to see the results.
Nearly every developed country is having a population crisis, as the fertility rate plummets. In New Zealand, it is down to 1.9, which is 10% below replacement level, and falling. The impact of this will start to be felt in another 30 years, when Statistics NZ expects deaths to outpace births for the first time. Last year, I asked Stats NZ what the fertility rate would be if we had not aborted 17,400 babies. The answer was : 2.5
In another article on the same day, The Times notes that in China and India there are now 150 million more men than women, a situation which poses dangers for the world that stem from a testosterone-heavy society.
Five years ago the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences in Beijing calculated that one Chinese man in six was unlikely to find a female partner. That's about 111 million unattached males. The excess of young men over women in India is almost as vast. In China now, 120 male babies are born for every 100 females. In some Indian villages the figure is nearer 150. The average figure around the globe is 105. In short, large areas of Asia seem to be going through a vast demographic shift that is unprecedented in history. A new book which looks at the potential problems, Bare Branches, has the subtitle, "The Security Implications of Asia's Surplus Male Population", which has caused a real stir. It hints ominously at the main thrust of the argument -that "the masculinisation of Asia's sex ratios" is likely to lead to "inherently unstable" societies that are high in crime and violence and a potential threat to neighbouring countries as well.
