Unnatural Selection Read online

  Since I refuse to venture a guess at when life begins, this is not a book about death and killing. I do not talk about feticide or gendercide or genocide, though some of the people I interviewed use those terms. On the other hand, I don’t believe the gradations in fetal development and the process by which life takes shape should be ignored, for they are what make widespread sex selection possible. Women who would never kill a newborn girl may abort on the basis of sex, and women who would never selectively abort may feel differently about eliminating embryos or sorting sperm. But in the end this is a book not about life and death but about the potential for life—and denying that potential to the very group responsible for perpetuating our beleaguered species.

  PART ONE

  “EVERYONE HAS BOYS NOW”

  Chapter 1

  THE DEMOGRAPHER

  It is often said that women make up a majority of the world’s population. They do not.

  —AMARTYA SEN1

  Midway through his career, Christophe Guilmoto stopped counting babies and started counting boys. A French demographer with a mathematician’s love of numbers and an anthropologist’s obsession with detail, he had attended graduate school in Paris in the 1980s, when babies had been the thing—the only thing, really. The field of demography had grown out of Thomas Malthus’s eighteenth-century predictions of exponential population growth and had remained focused on fertility figures and total population counts straight through the 1970s, when books like The Population Bomb gripped the popular imagination. By the time Guilmoto started his PhD, birth rates had started falling around the world, but the populations of many developing nations were still growing, and it was hard to shake the idea that overpopulation was a grave threat. Like many of his contemporaries, he concentrated on studying the drop in fertility, searching for clues of what factors proved decisive in lowering a country’s birth rate. He did his dissertation research in Tamil Nadu, a state in southwestern India where the birth rate had fallen to European levels even as income levels remained low, and as he graduated and started working as a scholar he returned there many times. By 1998 he headed up the South India Fertility Project, a formal effort to catalog the successes of Tamil Nadu and surrounding states.2 But over the course of working in India, he realized demography’s big story had changed. People were not simply having fewer children. They were having fewer girls. Population growth had been slowed, in part, by reducing the number of daughters.

  Guilmoto’s first inkling that something was wrong came in 1992, when he interviewed village nurses in Tamil Nadu for a short research project. A wiry Frenchman with wide-set eyes rattling off questions in Tamil, he must have cut an odd profile, but when he explained that he wanted to understand the demographic history of the area, the nurses spoke frankly and openly. Several offered up the detail that villagers occasionally killed their daughters shortly after birth. The news shocked him—as a demographer, he was well aware that humans committed infanticide at various points throughout history, but in most cultures the practice had disappeared by the early twentieth century—and he made it his private mission to determine just how pervasive daughter killing was. Later he visited an orphanage, where he found an aging French volunteer who had lived in India so long that she no longer spoke French. In a mixture of Tamil and English, the woman explained that most of the babies abandoned in the area were female. “Look, in the orphanage we have mostly girls,” she said. “What do you think?”

  The encounters left a deep impression on Guilmoto, and he thought of them at the turn of the millennium, when Indian census figures showed 111 boys born for every 100 girls.3 At first glance, the experiences of the village nurses and the orphanage worker helped explain the disparity, and indeed many foreign press reports blamed India’s dearth of girls on infanticide and abandonment. Looking into the matter, however, he realized they were only a small part of the story. Outside of the pocket of rural Tamil Nadu where he had happened to do field research, Indians rarely killed infants. “Everybody talked about infanticide because it carried more emotional weight,” he recalled. “But actually it was hardly in existence.” Tamil Nadu was one of the states where girls in fact had a better prospect of survival, while the northwest, a wealthy region considered India’s breadbasket, reported a regional sex ratio at birth of 126: 126 boys for every 100 girls.4 The real cause for the gap, Guilmoto quickly learned, was that pregnant women were taking advantage of a cheap and pervasive sex determination technique—ultrasound—and aborting female fetuses.

  The link to technology was alarming, for it meant that India’s skewed sex ratio at birth was an outgrowth of economic progress, not backward traditions. And India was hardly alone in recently developing a sex ratio imbalance. As he expanded his focus from fertility rates to sex ratio at birth, Guilmoto found that several other Asian countries exceeded the biological upper limit of 106 boys born for every 100 girls.b In the 1980s, South Korea, Taiwan, and parts of Singapore registered sex ratios at birth of above 109.5 China reported a sex ratio of 120. (Figures in both China and India have since risen to 112 in India and 121 in China.)6 Humans, Guilmoto realized, were engineering what he calls “rampant demographic masculinization”—a change with potentially grave effects for future generations.7 “It was very difficult,” he said, “not to see it as a revolution.” Within a few years, the revolution would spread to Western Asia and on to Eastern Europe.

  And yet in the places where this sinister biological shift should have been front and center, it was noticeably absent. Reports on global gender issues omitted the imbalance entirely, copiously detailing the status of women and yet ignoring the blatant fact that their ranks were decreasing. The United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA), the agency that finances population initiatives in the developing world, had been largely silent on the issue. Sex ratio imbalance lacked attention from reproductive rights organizations or funding from major philanthropies. With the exception of a few impassioned doctors and public health workers in Asia, it lacked advocates, period.

  For the past few years Guilmoto, now a senior fellow at the Institut de recherche pour le développement in Paris, has tried to fill that void by educating the world about the gravity of sex ratio imbalance. In 2005 he calculated that if Asia’s sex ratio at birth had remained at its natural equilibrium of 105 over the past few decades, the continent would have an additional 163 million females.8 The combination of ultrasound and abortion, in other words, has claimed over 160 million potential women and girls—in Asia alone. In the years he has spent studying the issue, the French scholar has noticed imbalanced sex ratios at birth crop up in unexpected places as economic development reaches new regions. And yet, because of other pressures on United Nations demographers, UN Population Division projections for the number of men and women who will inhabit the earth two, three, and five decades from now assume the sex ratio at birth has reached its highest level ever.9 Guilmoto believes those projections give a dangerously optimistic picture of where we’re headed. To him, gender imbalance resembles what demographers call a transitional phenomenon—a phase nations go through as they develop. That means it won’t be around forever. But countries in Asia and Eastern Europe are developing quickly, and many more are on the brink of economic progress. Millions of households around the world will enter the middle class over the coming years. In the process of leveling out, the world’s sex ratio imbalance will get a lot worse.

  If 160 million women were missing from the U.S. population, you would notice—160 million is more than the entire female population of the United States.10 Imagine America’s women wiped out. Imagine the country’s malls and supermarkets, its highways and hospitals, its boardrooms and classrooms exclusively filled with men. Imagine the bus or the subway or the car that takes you to work, then erase the females commuting alongside you. Erase your wife and your daughter. Or erase yourself. Imagine this and you come close to picturing the problem.

  But women have not disappeared from North America. They have disappeared from Asi
a and Eastern Europe. And that is why if you have heard about the gender imbalance it probably came in the form of a short international news item. Gender imbalance has been treated as a local problem, as something that happens to other countries. It is not a local problem. China and India together account for one third of the global population.11 Their lopsided birth totals have already skewed the sex ratio at birth of the entire world, which has risen from 105 to the biologically impossible 107.12 Sex selection defies culture, nationality, and creed. Gender imbalance has hit Vietnam, which wasn’t supposed to be patriarchal enough to avoid having girls. It has hit the Caucasus countries—Azerbaijan, Georgia, and Armenia—which no one had even contemplated as possible trouble zones. And it has hit the Balkans, that war-torn region a quick boat ride from Italy. Added up, these figures yield a gap in male and female births unrivaled in human history.13 The gender imbalance is a local problem in the way a superpower’s financial crisis is a local problem, in the way a neighboring country’s war is a local problem. Sooner or later, it affects you.

  If today’s disproportionately male generation of young people—call them Generation XY—were small, the sex ratio imbalance would be easy to dismiss. We might make up for the lack of women later on. But because the reduction in the number of females in the population has paralleled a reduction in the global birth rate, this generation is the largest that will hit many developing countries for decades to come.14 There are fewer potential mothers in China and India today, and tomorrow there will be even fewer daughters. Wang Feng, a demographer at the Brookings Institution who studies China’s sex ratio imbalance, calls it a “double whammy.”15 Guilmoto, meanwhile, now disseminates a bleak set of predictions in an attempt to jolt the world to action. Even using the conservative UN population projections, which assume that couples soon start having boys and girls in equal numbers—a change that is highly unlikely—restoring the global balance of males and females will take until 2050.16

  Development was not supposed to look like this. For as long as they have speculated about the status of women, social scientists have taken for granted that women’s position improves as countries get richer. Economic growth means that more girls go to school, and that those girls have access to a broader array of job opportunities when they grow up. It means that health care improves, leading to a drop in the number of mothers who die during childbirth. And it means, in most cases, that women gain access to contraception, allowing them to have fewer children and in turn spend more time working outside the home.

  The relationship between women’s empowerment and development is so sacred that it clouded the perception of scholars in developing countries as sex selection spread throughout Asia. Even as they witnessed the introduction of cheap ultrasound machines, many downplayed the impact of sex selective abortion, thinking it would disappear as their countries grew wealthier. At the Korea Women’s Development Institute in Seoul, sociologist Whasoon Byun confessed to thinking sex selection a distant threat when it hit South Korea in the 1980s. “My assumption was that if a woman was educated, then she would prefer a girl,” she told me. “But my assumption was wrong. I thought my case was general. I was a bad sociologist.” Instead, South Korea maintained a skewed sex ratio at birth straight through its entry to the elite club of nations that is the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development.17

  Scholarly thinking began to change in 1990, when the Nobel Prize–winning economist Amartya Sen published a watershed essay in The New York Review of Books entitled “More Than 100 Million Women Are Missing.” Social science theories had failed scholars, Sen wrote. Despite the economic progress that had swept Asia, at the level of raw numbers women and girls were worse off than ever before. “Economic development,” he stated, “is quite often accompanied by a relative worsening in the rate of survival of women”—a fact that constituted “one of the more momentous, and neglected, problems facing the world today.”18

  Sen did not sufficiently explain why 100 million women were missing, but simply by pointing out the disparity he made an impact.c His essay was both a wakeup call and an embarrassment to scholars. Western anthropologists and sociologists realized that in their painstaking analyses of women’s status across countries and cultures they had missed the big picture. Demographers saw they had been counting and projecting the wrong metric. Local scholars like Byun cast about for a new development theory that better explained their realities.

  By the time Guilmoto turned his attention to the sex ratio imbalance, it had become fashionable to study Sen’s missing women. But rather than illuminate the reasons behind the disturbing shortage of females, this boom in studies, and the press coverage that followed it, had the effect of further obscuring the issue. False accounts of female infanticide and widespread abandonment of girls in India were just the beginning. Some scholars found the gap between boy and girl births so outrageous that they concluded it must be the result of girls going unregistered. In the interpretation that gained credence for a few years, females were not missing; they were hidden. Papers appeared with titles like “Manipulation of Statistical Records in Response to China’s Population Policies” and “On the Trail of ‘Missing’ Indian Females.”19 Others dreamed up still more fanciful explanations. In 2005 University of Chicago economist Emily Oster wrote a paper claiming that the high rate of hepatitis B among Asians, which increases the probability a woman will give birth to a boy, was responsible for nearly half of Amartya Sen’s 100 million missing women.20 (Among other problems, Oster’s analysis did not account for the fact that in countries with imbalances the sex ratio at birth jumps significantly for children born second or later, a phenomenon that can’t be explained by disease. She later retracted her findings.)21 Western scholars found comfort in numbers, which could be interrogated and turned around or explained away. To read the papers written during this time is to be pulled into a world where an explanation is judged by the elegance of its equations rather than by how accurately those equations represent what is actually happening in a region’s villages and hospitals and classrooms. Asian scholars working on the ground, meanwhile, talked to average people extensively and then offered up narrow conclusions that explained sex selection as the product of local practices and traditions. In India they looked at the convention of dowry, which made daughters expensive; in China they focused on the one-child policy, which meant parents had limited chances to have a son.22 Cultural and political constraints mattered, of course, but they did not explain why sex ratio imbalance had hit so many countries at the same time. The problem demanded a global theory.

  A few years into researching gender imbalance, Guilmoto decided he would come up with one. “I was fed up with the local stories,” he told me. “There is a general trend of son preference visible in many places, and that is what matters.” As the number of missing females surged from 100 million to 160 million, he traveled the world, talking to government statisticians and hospital directors, touring cities and villages, and clipping newspaper reports. He combed through all the birth statistics he could find. He made digital sex ratio maps of Asia and Europe, shading danger zones in red. Then he started searching for patterns.

  Initially his data raised more questions than it answered. At the time he sat down to analyze his maps, Asian countries with skewed sex ratios at birth could be divided into regional blocks—East Asia (China, Taiwan, Singapore, and Vietnam), South Asia (India and Pakistan), and West Asia (Armenia, Azerbaijan, and Georgia).23 Beyond that, things got tricky. Sex selection happened among Hindus, Muslims, and Christians; among ethnic and political rivals; in economic powerhouses and in countries just on the cusp of development. Sexism might be an obvious culprit for imbalance if it weren’t so universal. Parents in nearly all cultures say they prefer boys, and yet sex selection only strikes in part of the world.d

  As Guilmoto continued to research the issue, however, he found some common threads that unite countries with gender imbalances. First, the countries where sex selection occurs
are developing rapidly, and their health care systems have matured to the point where prenatal screening is widely available. Second, abortion is pervasive. China, Vietnam, and South Korea all have exceptionally high abortion rates, and a reliance on pregnancy termination as a contraception method is also common to the Caucasus countries, as former Soviet republics. The final commonality derived from his early work in India. Most affected countries have recently experienced a drop in fertility.

  Over the past fifty years Asia has seen the most rapid decline in population growth of any continent in the history of the world. In the late 1960s, the average Asian woman had 5.7 children. In 2006 she had 2.3.24 When it comes to sex selection, a drop in the total fertility rate to two children is something of a turning point. If parents have more than two children, they have a good chance of having a son by sheer chance, without technological intervention. If they have only two children, though, 24 percent will conceive only daughters—and 24 percent screening for sex and aborting is enough to seriously skew a country’s sex ratio.25 And yet in parts of East Asia parents rarely have even two children. In South Korea, Japan, Taiwan, Singapore, Hong Kong, and Macau, which together boast the lowest fertility rates in the world, parents are far more likely to have one. Moving beyond the Asian tigers, the list of low fertility countries reads like a rundown of hot spots for missing girls. The average Vietnamese woman has only 1.9 children. Her Chinese counterpart has 1.5. Georgians are at 1.4 children per couple, just behind Switzerland. Armenians rank even further down the list, with just over 1.3, a total fertility rate close to that of Italy. Azerbaijanis have fewer children than Americans do.26