It seems like East Asian people in general give birth to more male babies, and I’ve heard that the gender ratio figures in China are somewhat exaggerated in official reports because people are more reluctant to report daughters to the government.
I find it hard to believe that so many women were having mid/late term abortions that the sex ratio reached 122:100 boys/girls in 2004, when Chinese people naturally have about 107 boys for every 100 girls. That’s just a ridiculous amount of abortion, even for a country that has some brutal practices and entrenched male preference.
I wonder if the increased sex ratio in China and India might be in part to do with their increasing prosperity. I’ve heard that when there is less hunger in a society there tends to be more boys born.
I’m curious to see if the Chinese 2020 census shines any new light on how bad the problem really is.
Infanticide was historically and no doubt still is practiced in rural areas in China, India and third world countries. Easy to say the baby was lost to a miscarriage and likely no one will question any further. Also, girls may be given (with or without payment) to family or non-family members who are childless.
As for the census, this article claims the last census numbers were manipulated upward.
“One incentive to inflate population size is that China’s family planning authority needs to present a picture of a “rapidly growing population” to justify the country’s brutal family control policies and even the very existence of the birth control apparatus.”
Up or down, even a few percentile difference equals tens of millions.
Add in the fact that China (and India, as well as other countries) are highly male oriented in everything from farming to politics, thereʻs a very strong incentive to fudge the numbers towards male dominance.
China’s One Child Policy allowed a second child if your child was a girl. China doesn’t have a pensions system, but it does have a legal requirement for sons to pay for their parents in their old age. So there are legal and financial issues which militate towards a disproportionately large number of male births.
So does everyone else. 107:100 is the normal sex ratio for boys:girls in the human species.
(Historically, it may have be 105:100 but with better health and nutrition perhaps more of the boy fetuses now survive to be born)
I think you underestimate the willingness of women to either comply with a “one child” policy or share the values of a patriarchal culture the puts a premium on sons. Used to be that a woman (or her husband) had to resort to infanticide, but abortion is in many ways easier.
I’m not sure why you doubt that that much abortion occurred/is occurring.
As I mentioned, that probably is connected to better health and nutrition. Boys at all stages of life have a higher death rate than girls, which might be why the sex ratio evolved to be slightly skewed. Better health and diet means more babies in general survive to be born, and survive infancy.
This. According to stats, the abortion rate in China is almost four times what it is in the US. I’ve read that sex education in China (including WRT contraception) is pretty abysmal, and abortion is seen as a socially acceptable method of birth control. Throw into the mix a culture that devalues girls, and there’s little reason to doubt the existing stats on sex-selective abortion there.
I am writing this is in the context of India. First of all it is a totally reprehensible problem. However, the government and people of India have taken many steps to stop this.
It was made illegal in 1994 for sonograms to detect the sex of the fetus. This law is very well enforced and all Indian parents do not know the sex of the fetus.
Some states (and cultures) are bad in this. You can see the statewise distribution for 2001 and 2011 (census years) of the adult and child sex ratios. Some states have improved their numbers
Unlike China, India does not have any forced population control but there is talk to give incentives (tax breaks, etc) to people having fewer kids. This is specially important because in some Indian cultures the parents will keep having kids until they have male children thereby reducing resources to the girl children.
This is a common statistical fallacy. You do not increase the number of males in the population by choosing to conceive a second child only if your first child is a girl.
I just wanted to emphasize this point. Every birth is a coin flip (although the coin is slightly weighted towards males–106-100 is the figure I had always heard).
And this fact is why there are such sinister implications from the relative absence of females in the population prior to the widespread availability of sex-specific abortion via ultrasound. At that time, the females could only have been removed from the population after birth.
You would if people disproportionately abort the second pregnancy upon learning that the fetus is female, though, wouldn’t you? People who kept the first girl, thinking that at least they could legally have a boy five years later, might be more inclined to abort a female fetus the second time around, if there’s no third opportunity for a boy baby under any circumstances.
Not when conceived, no. But we are talking about birth ratio. And abortion happens pre-birth. So determining the pre-natal sex of the fetus, and aborting female ones, DOES “increase the number of males in the population”.
Of course, that’s my entire point. Blindboyard’s scenario (at lest the way I read it) implied that if you make a decision to have a second child based on the fact that your first child is a girl, that alone is sufficient to increase the number of male births. The key is that the ratio can only be affected by what you do after you have determined the sex of a fetus, i.e. it requires either abortion or infanticide. But just deciding to conceive another child based on the sex of prior children has no effect on the sex ratio.
<shrug> turtle sign, hamburger sign. All one needs is a copy of the ultrasound with the genital area exposed and one doesn’t need someone to tell you what gender they sprog is after roughly 16 weeks. So unless they refuse to give you a copy of the ultra sound, nothing they can do about it. It isn’t like refusing to do an amniocentesis or whatever.
An acquaintance recently told me that this is also the case in South Korea, and that’s even true for military personnel who are stationed there because that’s how she found out about it, via a relative whose husband was in the military.
Does anyone know what happens to Chinese parents who have twins, or more? I’ve never been able to find an answer about that.
Twins were always a big exception to the “one child” rule. There were quite a few exceptions, but twins were the biggest, and when I lived there 5 years ago, my classrooms had a slightly higher rate of twins in them than I witnessed in other countries. Parents hell-bent on gaming the rules to have as many children as possible seemed to have them a lot.
I lived in Jinan, a relatively affluent city near Beigjing with a Chicago-sized population. Jinan has several western-style shopping malls, some of them kind of pricey. One of them, Parc 66 (next to Quancheng Park), has a children’s clothing store specially for twins. It looked like it might be a chain.
Anyway, twins are a very big thing in China and their parents are/were not punished for having them.