Over the past few decades, 160 million women have vanished from East and South Asia — or, to be more accurate, they were never born at all. Throughout the region, the practice of sex selection — prenatal sex screening followed by selective termination of pregnancies — has yielded a generation packed with boys. From a normal level of 105 boys to 100 girls, the ratio has shifted to 120, 150, and, in some cases, nearly 200 boys born for every 100 girls. In some countries, like South Korea, ratios spiked and are now returning to normal. But sex selection is on the rise in Eastern Europe, Southeast Asia, and the Middle East.
160 million missing girls
Q&A
‘Sex selection’ is creating a new endangered species: women. A journalist investigates the countries with too many men.
In a new book, “Unnatural Selection: Choosing Boys Over Girls, and the Consequences of a World Full of Men,” American journalist Mara Hvistendahl explores how birth ratios got out of hand and looks into the actual and potential effects on the women, men, and social economies of these regions. While for years the myth has held that any choice of sons occurred through rural infanticide, sex selection turns out to proliferate in the middle and upper classes; parents who have access to obstetric services, ultrasound, and abortion are the ones likely to choose boys.
Based on conversations held everywhere from Albania to Vietnam, with doctors, prospective parents, demographers, activists, and mail-order brides from Albania to Vietnam, Hvistendahl found that sex selection is linked to rapidly growing economies, the dispersal of cheap, portable prenatal screening technology, and holdover from midcentury Western population-control initiatives. More surprisingly, she discovered that as fewer girls are born, it does little to improve their status, and in fact makes them targets for arranged or forced marriages, kidnapping, and sex work.
Hvistendahl spoke to Ideas from Rotterdam, in the Netherlands.
IDEAS: What are the countries where sex selection takes place?
HVISTENDAHL: Sex selection is happening in China, India, South Korea, Taiwan, Vietnam, Albania, Azerbaijan, Georgia. These are all places where economic development has hit recently, and people are having fewer children and trying to make sure that one is a boy.
IDEAS: And you first noticed this in Chinese media reports?
HVISTENDAHL: Yes. It was when they broke it down by province. I saw that in western China you don’t have it so much, but in smaller booming cities in the East, between Shanghai and Beijing, the sex ratio is really high. In some places, it’s two boys for every girl.
IDEAS: So how has it been misunderstood?
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