In an essay published in the New York Review of Books nearly thirty years ago, Nobel Laureate Amartya Sen observed that there were more than 100 million fewer women than would be expected in places like China and his native India. He did not mean that these women were missing in the sense of being unaccounted for; rather, he noted that there were more men than women in these countries.
Two decades later, journalist Mara Hvistendahl published “Unnatural Selection: The book, entitled “Choosing Boys over Girls and the Consequences of a World Full of Men,” was published at a time when the estimate of missing women had grown to 160 million.
The “elephant in the room” behind this terrible trend is abortion. Initially, demographers and other researchers believed that the explanation must be that female infanticide—a practice that was common in the ancient world—had somehow made a comeback.
Instead, they discovered that female children were being identified in utero, via amniocentesis or ultrasound, and then aborted. The combination of technology, a preference for male children, government policies such as China’s infamous “One-Child Policy,” and legalised abortion had altered demographics from China to Albania.
Nevertheless, researchers have been reluctant to draw a direct link between abortion and the estimated 100 million missing women. For instance, Hvistendahl placed a considerably greater emphasis on cultural attitudes and discrimination against women.
While these factors undoubtedly contribute to the gender imbalance, the problem would not exist in its present form were it not for the lack of easy access to abortion.
A recent study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences explicitly establishes a connection between abortion and the gender imbalance. A study conducted by researchers from Britain concluded that between 1970 and 2017, “sex-selective abortions resulted in about 23.1 million missing baby girls.”
A demographer from the American Enterprise Institute has suggested that the figure may be an underestimate. In China and India alone, there are 70 million more men than women. The Chinese Academy of Social Sciences has estimated that by next year, 24 million Chinese men of marriageable age will be unable to find a spouse.
Given that mortality rates are considerably higher for males than for females, it is possible that Chinese and Indian women are experiencing a particularly unfortunate set of circumstances. Alternatively, it is more probable that the majority of the 70-plus million figure represents women who were killed as a result of sex-selection abortion.
This is the reason why both China and India have enacted legislation that the United States has not: to prohibit sex-selection abortions. While their laws are not consistently observed, at least China and India have acknowledged the problem.
The cultural preference for boys and the systemic discrimination against girls are phenomena that have been observed throughout history. However, the radical gender imbalance observed in countries such as China and India is a relatively recent phenomenon. It is noteworthy that this imbalance emerged concurrently with the advent of readily available abortion in the 1970s. To be frank, the legalisation of abortion made it easier to eliminate unwanted daughters.
To be even more precise, gendercide is not the consequence of abortions being carried out for the “wrong reason”; rather, it is the consequence of abortion itself. It is important to note that although a sexist act of violence occurring in a distant country may be perceived as less concerning than a similar incident occurring in one’s own community, it is nevertheless a reprehensible and unacceptable practice. The practice of elective abortion can give rise to sex-selective abortion. This phenomenon is also occurring in the United States.
It is, of course, challenging to persuade abortion-rights advocates to acknowledge this, given that it is akin to attempting to swim against the current of the Ganges from the Bay of Bengal to its source in the Himalayas. Best of luck with that.
Nevertheless, the stark reality is that hundreds of millions of women have been lost as a consequence of legalised abortion. It is a matter that is not likely to be resolved any time soon.
Editor’s Note: This article was originally published by Breakpoint and is being reposted here with their permission.