World appears slightly less bad due to supply and demand

September 1, 2009 8:56 PM

The government of Delhi is claiming success in reducing female infanticide by a recent scheme to pay the school fees of poor girls.

(if you go through to read the article you might want to be reminded that a lakh is 100,000)

posted by shothotbot (19 comments total)

Forgot to add: via.
posted by shothotbot at 8:59 PM on September 1

Odd that the Hindu.com article makes no mention of "infanticide," it discusses only "foeticide" as being the issue. Is there a certain amount of denial that infanticide, as opposed to selective abortions, is going on? Or are selective abortions seen as a greater problem? (Or is it just a language thing that I'm reading too much into?)
posted by Kadin2048 at 9:02 PM on September 1

Huh, yeah... that seems odd. Hard to imagine these mothers are getting ultrasounds to notify them of the gender. Is there some kind of cheap-ass urine test or something?
Look everyone, my vast ignorance of prenatal medicine is showing!
posted by Rat Spatula at 9:17 PM on September 1

christ, why did I go read this.
posted by Rat Spatula at 9:19 PM on September 1

Would it help if western nations fiddled with their visa & asylum caps to dramatically favor females? I've heard the money sent back home by immigrants actually dwarfs foreign aid, determining social mobility in many countries. So you might see a cultural impact if significantly more HB-1 recipients were female.
posted by jeffburdges at 10:30 PM on September 1

jeffburdges,

The problem with that is most Indians coming to the US on H1Bs are from the Indian middle class anyway. Even if the cap did favour women, it wouldn't help the uneducated poor.
posted by atrazine at 11:29 PM on September 1

Yes, I realize this but (a) maybe the middle class are doing this too, and (b) changing the middled class' "mythology" might change the poor too. I'd say clearly this cultural mythology clearly moves between social classes in the U.S. but I've no idea about India. I just can't imagine much else western nations could do, but that obviously doesn't mean gender based visa quotas would help either.
posted by jeffburdges at 12:06 AM on September 2

So you might see a cultural impact if significantly more HB-1 recipients were female.

The problem with that is most Indians coming to the US on H1Bs are from the Indian middle class anyway. Even if the cap did favour women, it wouldn't help the uneducated poor.

The excellent article in The New York Times Sunday Magazine a couple of weeks ago (discussed on the blue here) suggests that female education isn't the best way to address this issue; in fact, the problem of sex-selective abortion actually seems to worsen as you go up the educational ladder. (Also, per the HB-1 idea - the suspicious disparity between male and female births is still evident among Indians in the States.) The article hypothesizes about why this might be -- namely, because educated folks have smaller families, so there are fewer shots to "get it right" by having a son. Moreover, according to this article, women are active participants in sex selective abortion, as (so theorize the article's authors and the sociological theorists they cite) their status directly benefits from producing sons, but can actually suffers from producing daughters.

So, yeah. Not sure how to square all of this with the Delhi gov't's claims, because girls going to school is a very good thing. But just wanted to point out a recent article that makes potentially opposing claims.
posted by artemisia at 1:44 AM on September 2 [2 favorites]

I notice this scheme makes girl children more affordable. I wonder if it might cause some instances of male infanticide instead?
posted by TheophileEscargot at 1:53 AM on September 2

in fact, the problem of sex-selective abortion actually seems to worsen as you go up the educational ladder.

While the expression is quite gruesome in the cases referred to in the article, I don't believe this is a phenomenon culturally linked to India or Asia in particular. If you look at highly-educated and affluent North American couples, for example, they tend to have fewer children as they climb those ladders, down to a single child at the most-educated/wealthiest end... and they tend to prefer that single child to be a boy. Now, how they express that preference could be a problem that has no easy solution, especially since prenatal sexing is so easy and commonplace today. It's unlikely we'll ever know, really, how many people right here in America are making that choice... but doing it earlier and legally, presumably.

I don't intend to paint these Western folk with an evil brush, just to point out that the desire itself, however distasteful or wrongheaded, seems to transcend the specific cultures described in the article, so I don't think we should get all tsk-tsk-India (or China) here.

Would it help if western nations fiddled with their visa & asylum caps to dramatically favor females?

On a lighter note: I would support this, if only because Indian women are beautiful, and having more of them around would make any nation better.
posted by rokusan at 4:20 AM on September 2

I didn't suggest that visa Idea thinking that immigrants might not commit infanticide, merely that the stories of daughters of middle class Indian families getting rich in the U.S. and E.U. might increase the social value of daughters in India.

I don't think making daughters less expensive and more valuable will lead to male infanticide. The vast majority of parents will want to keep their child. If you give daughters different social advantages, like better chances for getting rich abroad, then most parents will simply accept the advantages and disadvantages chance deals them. We also don't really mind if sex selective abortions favor females, the issue is that excessively male societies are much more warlike.

I'm not sure you can easily address sex selective abortions that occur in minority groups in the U.S. because they aren't creating a systemic problem. But I'm sure some right wing loons will happily pass you a law saying that doctors may require counseling if they feel an abortion is sex selective.
posted by jeffburdges at 4:51 AM on September 2

The problem with that is most Indians coming to the US on H1Bs are from the Indian middle class anyway.

Punjab is one of the wealthiest and best educated states in India, but infanticide and foeticide are highest there.

As I understand it, the main reason continues to be dowry. Being wealthier doesn't make it cheaper to marry off your daughter; it just sets the expected dowry higher.
posted by vanar sena at 5:38 AM on September 2

Some numbers from the Wikipedia page on sex-selection abortion:

The British medical journal The Lancet reported in early 2006 that there may have been close to 10 million female fetuses aborted in India over the past 20 years.

This does not strike me as particularly high, that is 500,000 abortions a year in a country with a population over a billion.

As a result, the United Nations says an estimated 2,000 unborn girls are illegally aborted every day in India

That would be 730,000 a year. Compare that to 1.3 million in the United States with a population of 300,000.

reduction of female-to-male sex ratio from 945 per 1000 in 1991 to 927 per 1000 in 2001.

The social and legal reforms since the establishment of the Chinese Republic have since made infanticide illegal, however the Chinese government reports show that the sex ratio for newborns is 847 girls per 1000 boys

Clearly China has a far bigger problem.
posted by Secret Life of Gravy at 6:04 AM on September 2 [1 favorite]

Jeff, you had me until this bit: We also don't really mind if sex selective abortions favor females, the issue is that excessively male societies are much more warlike.

I was only able to skim the articles, was this mentioned? Otherwise, I’m gonna throw out a [citation needed]
posted by Think_Long at 6:53 AM on September 2

Rat Spatula: Huh, yeah... that seems odd. Hard to imagine these mothers are getting ultrasounds to notify them of the gender. Is there some kind of cheap-ass urine test or something?

They are getting ultrasounds. Whatever an ultrasound costs in the US, it costs (at most) 1/10th as much in India. Also, I think blood work can tell you, and that is also proportionally cheaper.

When I first got to India there was a maternity/neo-natal doctor's office on the same block as my hotel, and they had a huge sign saying that in compliance with Indian law they would not, for any reason, disclose the sex of the baby. I saw a similar sign when I was in the hospital, but I was in a whole separate area from the OB/GYN stuff, so I only caught a glimpse of it.

Hopefully, if Delhi has success with this, the system will spread nation-wide, and maybe in a generation or two, the whole idea of sex-selective abortions will be a vague memory.
posted by paisley henosis at 7:00 AM on September 2

Also, don't forget, the poor, and many women in India, are still at risk also from "accidental" honor killings, also known as dowry death.

It's terribly sad stuff. Prohibiting dowries didn't change the situation much, hopefully this will help.
posted by paisley henosis at 7:08 AM on September 2

Yeah, Wikipedia cleared things up for me... obviously, supply and demand applies to ultrasounds as well as anything else...
posted by Rat Spatula at 8:00 AM on September 2

I've just heard that societies with more men are more warlike several times, but concrete sources are pretty thin actually. I guess there are actually many reasons why people worry about gender imbalance, for example : I'm seeing data that more single males leads to more crime. Too few females may cause the population to drop faster than desirable, disrupting the economy. Sex selective abortions among the middle class may lead to infanticide among the poor. etc.
posted by jeffburdges at 8:34 AM on September 2

There seem to be a lot of misconceptions floating around here.

Delhi is not paying school fees; education is already free in India. It is paying a sort of stipend.

Infanticide is not as common as sex-selective abortion. Either way, these are important not only as evils in themselves, but as barometers of treatment of girl children, who may suffer in other ways (neglect, malnutrition, emotional abuse).

Sex is determined through ultrasound.

The number of people who emigrate to western countries is far too insignificant to be any driver of social change.

The idea that this will lead to male infanticide shows a lack of understanding of the Indian mindset.

Honor killings have nothing to do with dowry deaths. Two completely unrelated evils.
posted by splitpeasoup at 3:31 PM on September 3