The Global War Against Baby Girls – Part III
Today I bring you the last in a three-part blog series on Nicholas Eberstadt’s article in the New Atlantis entitled “The Global War Against Baby Girls”. On Friday, we talked about the problem of female feticide in China. On Monday, we looked at the problem elsewhere in the world. Today, Ebertadt article looks at the global effect of this problem and whether there is any hope for the future.
The first thing to realise is that the problem of sex-selective abortions and neglect of female infants is truly massive. Eberstadt, using the figures provided by the United Nations Population Division (UNPD) and the US Census Bureau’s International Programs Center (IPC), as well as official demographic statistics from various nations, estimates that those countries with a sex ratio at birth (SRB), or a sex ratio below the age of 5, boys to girls of 107 or higher:
“…total…over 50 countries and territories accounting for over 3.2 billion people, or nearly half of the world’s total population. By the reckoning of UNPD, the overall global sex ratio at birth has already assumed naturally impossible heights in the era of sex-selective abortion, rising from 105 in 1975-80 to 107 for 2005-10. By the same token, IPC puts the worldwide under-5 child sex ratio at 107 for 2010. To go by both UNPD and IPC reconstructions of local age-sex structures, today’s societies with unnaturally high SRBs and/or child sex ratios had an aggregate “boy surplus” of over 55 million males under the age of 20 by the year 2010; and if we assume that the SRBs and child/youth sex ratios in these societies should be around 105, the unnatural “girl deficit” for females 0-19 years of age as of 2010 would have totalled roughly 32-33 million by both UNPD and IPC figures.”
It is indeed a massive issue – one that the sheer numbers make it hard to comprehend. But it is not surprising that with these figures in mind, Eberstadt claims that the global war:
“…has come to distort the population composition of the entire human species: this new and medicalized war against baby girls is indeed truly global in scale and scope.”
Eberstadt understandably does not hold anything back when he discusses the effect of sex-selective abortions:
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