Girl Shortage Causes Wife Buying In India

The use of amniocentesis and ultrasound to guide sex selective abortions is leading to a shortage of females in India.

The villages are full of frustrated bachelors. In Haryana, a quarter of the female population has simply disappeared.

Many now see buying wives from outside as their only option.

A study of sex ratio trends in India from 1981 to 1991 predicted the sale of women.

The adverse sex ratio has not increase the value of women by decreasing the supply. India’s population sex ratio worsened from 972 females per 1000 males in 1901 to 929 per 1000 in 1991. At the same time, women's status steadily eroded despite gains in some sectors by some groups. A ‘shortage’ of women does not lead to their increased value, but to greater restrictions and control placed over them. In China, practices such as kidnapping and sale of women, organized import of wives from other countries, etc., have been noted as a result of the shortage of women there. The same might be predicted for India.

Still, one reason many families abort the females is to avoid expensive dowries.

On the other hand, there is a great deal of public support in India from pro-sex selective abortion advocates who feel that these tools are helping families to cope with intransigent problems, especially dowry. Health clinics, buoyed by record profits, are aggressively selling their wares. One clever economic pitch blares from tens of thousands of billboards through the country--"Pay five hundred rupees [US$14.00] now rather than five lakhs [Rs500,000 or $14,000] later." Poor families, fearing expensive dowries that can cripple a family, willing undergo the tests.

Shouldn't the female shortage cause an end to the dowry practice or shift it in the opposite direction? Will the market apply corrective forces? Laws against sex selection are not working.

In the midst of such strong public support of these tests, criminalization has not noticeably reduced their use. Even with the passage of the Prenatal Diagnostic Techniques (Regulation and Prevention of Misuse) Act of 1988 in Maharastra, and similar acts in Haryana, Punjab and Gujarat, sex determination practices could not be stemmed.

This article makes a claim that is a surprise to me: dowry only dates back to the 19th century.

However, in approximately the 19th century, the loving practice of stri dana was joined by the very much different concept of dowry. Dowry became first an expected, then a demanded, offering given by the bride's family to the groom's family at the time of marriage.

Dowry is far from the only factor leading to sex selection in favor of males. The high rate of sex selection in China demonstrates that sex selection happens in societies which do not have the dowry custom.

"The male sex preference in China is clearly established with 118 or 119 male birth for 100 female births," said Caroline Hoy, a demographer from Dundee University. She said a survey of migrant workers carried out in Beijing in 1994 put the skew higher, at an average 139 male births for 100 female births.

In rural areas of China the status of women is so low that their existence is under-reported. But the ratio of males to females is still very high.

However population statistics show that the sex ratio in China is unique among all the large countries of the world. Artificial sex selection is the cause of this. In recent years, the use of ultrasound equipment, the traditional Chinese method of feeling pulse, folk remedies, and the crippling of girl babies occur frequently in some areas. These practices have aggravated the imbalance in the Chinese sex ratio. In some areas the male : female sex ratio has reached 130:100.

An in-depth study in a small area confirmed the widespread use of prenatal sex selection and abortion.

Chu designed a questionnaire to assess the prevalence of prenatal sex selection and abortion. The survey started in one village and spread to over 100 villages in five townships of the county. In-depth interviews took place in six villages in three townships of the county.

The 820 women surveyed reported 301 induced abortions. Of these, 36 percent (109) were acknowledged to be female sex-selective abortions. The sex ratio of births reported by the women in the survey was much higher than the biological norm of about 105-107 males per 100 females. The sex ratio of children ever born was 125.9 and of living children it was 126.1. "Prenatal sex selection was probably the primary cause, if not the sole cause, for the continuous rise of the sex ratio at birth in the study area in the past decade," Chu maintains.

According to Chu, female infant abandonment or infanticide is extremely rare in the county she studied. "Rural families believe in fate: if they do something horrible, they will be punished by unseen forces. Besides, it is easy to arrange for the adoption of unwanted girls," she says.

Think about the implications of these reports. Tens or hundreds of millions of people are willing to abort fetuses in order to choose a characteristic in their offspring. Is there any doubt that once genetic engineering of embryos becomes possible that it will pass into widespread use?

Francis Fukuyama claims the government of South Korea successfully stopped the practice of sex selection.

Governments can intervene successfully to correct individual choices like these. The severe sex ratio imbalance in Korea that emerged in the early 1990s was noticed, and the government took measures to enforce existing laws against sex selection so that today the ratio is much closer to 50-50. If the government of a young democracy like Korea can do this, I don't see why we can't.

This report from 1999 throws doubt on Fukuyama's claim.

Hunger for girl tots is anomalous on the Asian continent, where abortions of XX-chromosome fetuses are widespread. Significant gender imbalance has resulted in many nations: China has 118 boys per 100 girls under age 5, Korea has 117 to 100, and Taiwan is 110 to 100.

How is sex selection done in South Korea in spite of its illegality? Its pretty simple. For any country that allows abortion if ultrasound is available for legal purposes then there is an easy and unprovable way to do sex selection.

It is a possibility that a particular sex will be preferred and for this reason sex selection could result. An example of this is currently being seen in Korea. Korea currently predicts a 10% increase in the male to female ratio within the next 30 years. Sex selection is not legal in Korea, but doctors give unspoken results through the amount of enthusiasm they show the mothers. If the doctor lacks enthusiasm upon the test results, the mother often calls for an abortion, knowing that the fetus is female (Wolf, 1996).

It is currently legal to use sex selection techniques in the United States though the practice hasn't yet become widespread. The MicroSort technique of pre-fertilization sex selection removes the need for abortion but costs a few thousand dollars and while it pushes the odds heavily toward one sex or the other its success rate is less than perfect.

Here's how Fortune magazine recently summed up at least the potential market for MicroSort alone: "Each year, some 3.9 million babies are born in the U.S. In surveys, a consistent 25 percent to 35 percent of parents and prospective parents say they would use sex selection if it were available. If just two percent of the 25 percent were to use MicroSort, that's 20,000 customers . . . [and] a $200-million-a-year business in the U.S. alone."

Curiously, there have been historical circumstances in which females have had survival advantages.

Eckart Voland of Göttingen University has studied church records of births, deaths and marriages from Ostfriesland, along the northern coastal region of Germany, as these records also show interesting sex differences in survival. The analysis of records from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries turned up a couple of hundred cases where one spouse died, leaving a number of living children. In this monogamous, Christian, agricultural society, if a young wife lost her husband she almost invariably became very poor. Any sons that she had were unlikely to compete adequately with boys from richer families, but her daughters, like the daughters of low ranking hinds in Clutton-Brock's studies, always had some chance of marrying up the social ladder. An investment in daughters in this particular social situation had an adaptive biological significance and, as evolutionary biology would predict, the sons of widows were 36 per cent more likely to die in infancy and childhood than the daughters. When men lost their wives, however, their economic status did not change and they often had the opportunity to remarry; the sons of widowers were no more likely to die young than their daughters.

There is one modern society where female children are preferred: Japan.

ISEHARA, Japan - In a surprising repudiation of the traditional Asian values that for centuries have put a premium on producing male heirs, surveys show that up to 75 percent of young Japanese parents now prefer baby girls. Daughters are seen as cuter, easier to handle, more emotionally accessible and, ever more important in this fast-aging society, more likely to look after their elderly parents.

By Randall Parker at 2003 February 05 11:31 AM  Biotech Society