Unnatural Selection Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Dedication

  PROLOGUE

  PART ONE - “EVERYONE HAS BOYS NOW”

  Chapter 1 - THE DEMOGRAPHER

  Chapter 2 - THE PARENT

  Chapter 3 - THE ECONOMIST

  Chapter 4 - THE DOCTOR

  Chapter 5 - THE IMPERIALIST

  PART TWO - A GREAT IDEA

  Chapter 6 - THE STUDENT

  Chapter 7 - THE DOOMSAYER

  Chapter 8 - THE GENETICIST

  Chapter 9 - THE GENERAL

  Chapter 10 - THE FEMINIST

  PART THREE - THE WOMANLESS WORLD

  Chapter 11 - THE BRIDE

  Chapter 12 - THE PROSTITUTE

  Chapter 13 - THE BACHELOR

  Chapter 14 - THE WORLD

  Chapter 15 - THE BABY

  EPILOGUE

  Acknowledgements

  NOTES

  INDEX

  Copyright Page

  To Mom,

  and to moms

  We will now discuss in a little more detail the

  Struggle for Existence.

  —CHARLES DARWIN,

  ON THE ORIGIN OF SPECIES

  PROLOGUE

  Mao Zedong once said that women hold up half the sky, and until I moved to China I believed it. My mother, a missionary’s daughter with a decidedly agnostic bent, was the first to tell me that in the People’s Republic men and women were equal. She had spent her teenage years in Asia before returning to the United States to study Chinese history, and when she informed me about Mao’s famous fraction she probably took out a photo album and pointed to photos of sensible-looking women with hair cropped into practical bobs. I can’t remember. In any case, the lifestyle she chose for us drove the lesson home.

  When divorce left my mother with two young children and a mortgage, she took a Chinese friend into our Minneapolis home as a roommate. Hongyu was also recently divorced, and she had a son, who with my brother and me made three. Both Hongyu and my mother soon started graduate school, and they devised a strategy that might today be called coparenting. Back then it was called making do. They were something of an odd couple; my mother was happiest when dancing in a new outfit to Marvin Gaye albums, while Hongyu—who had grown up in Inner Mongolia during the Cultural Revolution—bought her clothes secondhand and could make a chicken last a week. But while they weren’t life partners, they were partners in raising us, trading off cooking and child care and planning outings and vacations together.

  We lived on discount real estate, in a small house adjacent to the Minneapolis-St. Paul airport. Several times a day airplanes roared overhead, cutting so close to the roof that they darkened the sky and rendered conversation all but impossible. Between the planes and three children stir-crazy from Minnesota winters, I am not sure how my mother and Hongyu ever managed to study. But what I remember most from that time is an impression of strength. In our house women held up all the sky—and took out the garbage.

  That impression stayed with me as I grew up, started studying Chinese, and finally went to China. In the summer of 2000 I spent a few months in Beijing on a language course. I was twenty and in college and had seen very little of the world, but from what I could tell my childhood vision of gender equality was accurate. China had female tycoons, female scientists, female writers, and in some ways the lot of women—like that of men—was improving every day. The faces in the photos from my mother’s 1980s albums had projected a sort of grim hopefulness. Back then women were so proud to own refrigerators that they crocheted dust covers for them and placed the appliances in the living room. (Then too most Chinese apartments had kitchens so small that refrigerators did not fit anywhere else.) By 2000 women were zipping across Beijing in Audis, dining at fancy restaurants, and stopping in for coffee afterward at Starbucks.

  But there were also signs of trouble. Midway through the summer our teachers took us on a field trip to a kindergarten. Probably the goal was to have us talk with the one subset of Chinese people who shared our limited power of expression. What I remember, though, is the school’s population. In the sea of tiny smiles that greeted us, boys outnumbered girls.

  On the bus ride back to the university one of our instructors, an energetic, sturdy woman named Teacher Zhang, explained in slow, clearly enunciated Chinese. I couldn’t have known the word for “ultrasound,” which had been imported from the West so recently that it contained a piece of the Roman alphabet: B. But somehow I understood: some women were going in for scans halfway through their pregnancies. If they discovered their fetus was female, they would abort.

  I wish I could say that was my eureka moment, that I fast-forwarded to what it would mean for China as the boys in the kindergarten grew up—that I looked into the issue and realized boys were proliferating in India, Azerbaijan, Vietnam, South Korea, and Albania as well. But the truth is I didn’t imagine the sex ratio imbalance could endure. While ultrasound technology was modern, like many people at the time I thought that using it for something as crass as sex selection had to be temporary: one last instance of sexist traditions rearing their ugly head.

  It was only after I moved to China to work as a journalist four years later that I started to dwell on the societal implications of a population with tens of millions more men than women. The scene from the kindergarten repeated itself again and again. Once I journeyed to a small city in Shandong province to write an article on the solar heating system being installed in a school, and I found myself in another classroom full of smiling boys. I was tempted to abandon the solar power article and interview the teachers about the school’s population. Being my mother’s child, and being Hongyu’s child, I didn’t understand it. But it was clear the sky was sagging.

  For as long as they have counted births, demographers have noted that on average 105 boys are born for every 100 girls. This is our natural sex ratio at birth. The ratio can vary slightly in certain conditions and from one geographic region to the next. More boys are born after wars. More girls are born around the equator, for reasons we don’t yet understand.1 But in general the sex ratio at birth hovers around 105.

  So is our population male-dominated from the start? To the contrary: that more boys are born is itself a form of balance, neatly making up for the fact that males are more likely to die young. That extra 5 percent of boy babies compensates, as the German statistician Johann Peter Süssmilch observed in 1741, “for the higher male losses due to the recklessness of boys, to exhaustion, to dangerous tasks, to war, to sailing and emigration, thus maintaining the balance between the sexes so that everyone can find a spouse at the appropriate time of marriage.”2 While today males are less likely to die from sailing, exhaustion, or migration, they still account for the majority of soldiers throughout the world. They also disproportionately expose themselves to threats like smoking—a man’s pursuit in many countries—or riding motorcycles without wearing a helmet. Boys outnumber girls at birth because men outnumber women in early deaths.

  Süssmilch, who was also a priest, was an early proponent of intelligent design; he concluded this natural check was the work of a meticulous creator. (The book in which he put forth his theory was titled The Divine Order as Derived from Demography.)3 When Charles Darwin looked into the sex ratio at birth a century later, he intuited that a balanced number of males and females instead connected somehow to evolution. Trends in human populations, Darwin noted, paralleled those found in the animal world.a But that raised a question: What then was the purpose of the intense battles for mates among many species? To witness “two males fighting for the possession of the female, or several male birds displaying their gorgeous plumage, and performing strange antics before an assembled body of females,” as Darwin
wrote in The Descent of Man, it was clear that a fierce evolutionary competition was at work.4 This competition was perhaps most evident in the peacock’s feathers: the colorful plumes would make sense if, as a rule, the sex ratio were skewed. If peahens were generally scarce, the male birds’ adornment would be a feature they had developed over generations to boost their chances of passing on their genes. A balanced sex ratio meant even the ugliest and most pitiful peacock had hope of finding a peahen.

  But after extensive correspondence with farmers, shepherds, and biologists—Darwin even dutifully tallied sex ratios among English racehorses—the naturalist determined most species were in fact balanced. “After investigating, as far as possible, the numerical proportion of the sexes,” he wrote, “I do not believe that any great inequality in number commonly exists.”5

  Darwin went back and forth on exactly how a balanced sex ratio could be reconciled with his theory of natural selection, coming very close to a solution in the first edition of The Descent of Man and then retracting it in the second edition. “I now see that the whole problem is so intricate that it is safer to leave its solution for the future,” he wrote.6 And yet the naturalist surmised that balanced sex ratios were somehow critical to species survival.

  In 1930 the English scientist Ronald A. Fisher arrived at the explanation that had eluded Darwin. Fisher’s theory works like this in humans: if male births become less common, men have better mating prospects than women. People with an assumed genetic disposition to have boys then have an advantage in passing on their genes. Put more simply, parents of sons have more grandchildren than parents of daughters. As the overall sex ratio approaches equilibrium, however, the advantage of producing sons disappears, and the sex ratio at birth balances out. (Unfortunately, this mechanism does not work on skewed sex ratios of the sort seen in Asia today.) Fisher was also an enthusiastic eugenicist who believed in sterilizing the “unfit.” With John Maynard Keynes, he was among the founding members of the Cambridge University Eugenics Society.7 But he enshrined in evolutionary biology the notion that sex ratios are naturally balanced. Today a 1:1 sex ratio is called “Fisherian.”

  A balanced sex ratio is now considered healthy in most species, to the extent that conservation work often focuses on boosting the number of females. It isn’t just that females are the ones who bear offspring, though of course that matters. In mammals who spend years rearing their young a skewed sex ratio can quickly veer out of control. If females are scarce, males may kill a female’s existing offspring to maximize their chance at passing on their genes, inadvertently speeding up the species’ path toward extinction. When the sex ratio of a group of brown bears living in the French Pyrenees recently skewed male, conservationists recommended a relocation program aimed at bringing males closer to potential mates. As one scientist put it, “Male bears need more females.”8

  But when it comes to our own species, we are considerably less attentive. While evolution encourages a balanced sex ratio, our large brains have always worked against one. For as long as we have documented reproduction, we have also sought ways to control it.

  The ancient Greeks believed that when it came to procreation men’s testicles had specific roles: the left testicle produced girls, while the right one yielded boys. Aristotle took this to its logical but painful conclusion, teaching that men should tie off their left testicle during intercourse if they wanted a son. Well into the eighteenth century European men continued to follow this line of thinking; some went so far as to cut off their left gonad. 9 But Aristotle also believed a baby’s sex was determined by a number of other factors. Women, he advised, should help their suffering husbands by making an effort to “think male.”10 And he observed, based on interviews with farmers, that with livestock “more males are born if copulation takes place when north [rather] than when south winds are blowing.”11

  The Greeks were hardly alone in offering complicated prescriptions for sex control. The Talmud advised men to bring their wives to early orgasm in order to have a son, advice that may have ended up in more pregnancies but probably had little effect on the sex ratio.12 And Indian ayurvedic texts outlined practices for manipulating the sex of a fetus—once it was in the mother’s womb.13

  But it is only in the past three decades that we have been able to control a baby’s sex with certainty. Our new capabilities demand a reconsideration of Darwin’s work. What does it mean to tinker with one of evolution’s most fundamental balances? Do we have the hubris to assume that what disrupts the brown bear won’t affect us? We still don’t know the evolutionary effects of fundamentally altering the sex ratio at birth, but a cursory glance back at history suggests it is not a great idea to mess with something we don’t understand.14

  If anything, we are making more of a mess of our species than brown bears ever could of theirs. When I started thinking about this book, I pictured talking to parents, demographers, perhaps a few government officials. I did not imagine I was beginning a journey on which I’d encounter prostitutes and trafficked wives and mail-order brides, gun enthusiasts and militant nationalists and the proprietor of a Fight Club–like “anger bar,” geneticists and AIDS researchers—and a lone U.S. military contractor. I did not know it would take me back in time to the American Wild West and into the future to the 2047 India that now preoccupies fans of science fiction. I did not picture villages in poor countries where most women have been sold or villages in rich countries where most have been bought. I had only the vague idea that a sharp decrease in women could not be good for the human race. And on that point I was proven sadly correct.

  On other assumptions I was wrong. I began reporting on the sex ratio imbalance by making a series of trips to a particularly skewed quarter of China, a corner of Jiangsu province where the ratio of boys to girls born had reached 3 to 2. After the third trip I returned to Shanghai and read everything I could find on the topic. I had been assigned a long article for the Virginia Quarterly Review, a small literary magazine whose editor gives writers a rare degree of freedom, and as I sat down to write I decided it would be a story about gender discrimination and how it persisted as China developed. That wasn’t just my own prejudice. As a science journalist I was used to relying on data, and that was what all the reports said. It was also what the parents I had interviewed told me.

  That article ran to nineteen pages, but when I finished it I felt vaguely unfulfilled. I still didn’t fully understand why girls were “missing” from China, as some had put it. The way I grew up and the degree of gender progress I witnessed in the few years I’d spent in China conflicted with the notion that entrenched discrimination was at play. Somewhere in the back of my mind lingered my mother’s descriptions of equality, even as I recognized that on the most fundamental level men and women were no longer equal. Some reports I read traced the disappearance of girls to the one-child policy, to the fact that Chinese parents wanted to carry on the family line with their one chance to have a child. That made some sense. And yet the one-child policy did not explain why girls had gone missing from Albania or Azerbaijan. But as the article grew into a more ambitious undertaking I stuck to the gender discrimination explanation, for it was the only one I had. “The best way to convince more couples to have girls,” I wrote in the proposal for this book, “is to improve the status of women by boosting opportunities for education and career advancement.”

  It was midway through a trip to India that I realized the reports I’d been reading were wrong. Two men I met there—a gynecologist and a public health worker—told me a very different tale. In their version of events, the sex ratio imbalance now sweeping through Asia and parts of Europe traces to elite institutions in the West.

  At first I was skeptical: how had the reporters, demographers, and various activists who write about sex ratio imbalance missed such a critical link? But a little time wading through archives quickly cured me of disbelief. And that is how this became a book about information that some had hoped to keep hidden, about misguided theorists
focused only on the big picture and scientists with tunnel vision, and about population, technology, and abortion.

  A final word on this last point: not all sex selection involves abortion. Sophisticated technologies used with in-vitro fertilization or artificial insemination now allow parents to control the sex of a baby at the embryonic stage—in some cases even before conception. But outside of the United States those technologies are still nascent. Today in the developing world, abortion is most of the story. For now.

  Abortion is also an issue with a long and fraught history in the United States. That history should not affect Americans’ concern for what happens in China and India, but sadly it does. I inherited my mother’s agnosticism, and I have always believed in a woman’s right to terminate a pregnancy, but again and again over the course of reporting this book I ended up treading onto unexpected political ground. At moments I found myself perusing right-wing religious websites and agreeing with anti-abortion activists and corresponding with public relations officers whose voice mail messages ended with “God bless.” At others I shook my head in dismay at deceptive reports put out by organizations whose dictums I had once accepted as fact. More frequently, I was disappointed at the degree to which domestic American politics prevented action on a problem of great importance shaping a large portion of the world’s population—a fact for which both the right and the left bear responsibility.

  The finer points of the abortion debate elude me. When does life begin? And what do we mean by life—a heartbeat, the ability to exist outside the womb with medical assistance, the ability (now something else entirely) to exist outside the womb without technology? These questions have always struck me as unanswerable, and my reporting only made them more muddled. The reality I know is too nuanced to support an absolute line. A zygote is different from a fetus at six months, and a fetus at six months is different from a baby. And any mother will tell you there are many gradations in between—the first bout of morning sickness, the first kick to the gut, the first secondhand hiccup.