At birth, boys outnumber girls everywhere in the world, by much the same proportion—there are around 105 or 106 male children for every 100 female children. Just why the biology of reproduction leads to this result remains a subject of debate. But after conception, biology seems on the whole to favor women. Considerable research has shown that if men and women receive similar nutritional and medical attention and general health care, women tend to live noticeably longer than men. Women seem to be, on the whole, more resistant to disease and in general hardier than men, an advantage they enjoy not only after they are forty years old but also at the beginning of life, especially during the months immediately following birth, and even in the womb. When given the same care as males, females tend to have better survival rates than males.So no, "getting over it" really isn't a good idea. Not if you give a damn about human welfare.
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The fate of women is quite different in most of Asia and North Africa. In these places the failure to give women medical care similar to what men get and to provide them with comparable food and social services results in fewer women surviving than would be the case if they had equal care. In India, for example, except in the period immediately following birth, the death rate is higher for women than for men fairly consistently in all age groups until the late thirties. This relates to higher rates of disease from which women suffer, and ultimately to the relative neglect of females, especially in health care and medical attention. Similar neglect of women vis-à-vis men can be seen also in many other parts of the world. The result is a lower proportion of women than would be the case if they had equal care—in most of Asia and North Africa, and to a lesser extent Latin America.
“It has been seen that whenever total fertility rates have fallen, there has been a visible impact on the sex ratio” said A.L. Sharada, the director of Mumbai’s Population First non-profit, which works on population and health issues, and runs campaigns against sex selection. “The preference for the son is so strong in the mindsets that naturally when they want a smaller family, people prefer sons.”
ShanghaiScrap: ...you provided readers with one of the book’s most jarring conclusions: “Reproductive rights activists often blame men for sex selection … [A]cross China and India, across South Korea and Vietnam and Azerbaijan, the decision to abort is most often made by a woman – either the pregnant woman herself or her mother-in-law, who has a vested interest in her son’s offspring … ” As a feminist, I wonder if you could describe the process by which you came to that conclusion, and why it – the female mediated discrimination against female children – hasn’t become a feminist issue.My personal take (as it pertains to China) is that the skewed sex ratio is not as simple as reducing it to the product of a male dominated society controlling women's bodies, rural infanticide or even the one-child policy. It's more nuanced that that.
Hvistendahl: To some extent I think it’s just easier to blame domineering men —or the one-child policy, or any other number of external factors that have been named as causes of the sex ratio imbalance. Acknowledging that women are making these decisions themselves is much more complex.
Again it comes back to that notion of choice. Reproductive rights organizations tend to argue that sex selection exists because of entrenched gender discrimination, and the way to prevent it and balance out the sex ratio at birth in China and other countries is to focus on discrimination as the root cause—and funnel resources toward things like education and job opportunities for women. Well, it turns out that the sex ratio at birth is very skewed among educated women in India, while among illiterate women is close to balanced.
The same holds true for China to some degree: sex selection is happening not in poor western provinces but in booming second-tier cities in the east. Liao Li, the Suining women who took me to the church service, had aborted two female fetuses, and at some point she said, look, this is about gaining face—about earning respect from other people in the community.
I’m sure there are men who pressure their wives into aborting female fetuses, but my conversations with women revolved much more around things like face and social standing. On some level, sex selection abortion is prompted by a basic human craving for status—a craving to which women are just as susceptible as men.
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posted by three blind mice at 7:41 AM on June 10, 2011 [5 favorites]