Where Are All of The Women?

It should have been an obvious outcome of the combination of unforgiving government attempts at population control, cultures that value men above women, and advancements in medical technology that allow sex identification and the termination of the unwanted in utero.

Gendercide The worldwide war on baby girls: Technology, declining fertility and ancient prejudice are combining to unbalance societies

According to the article the normal ratio of births is 103 to 106 boys for every 100 girls. But in some areas there have been reported ratios as high as 275 boys for every 100 girls. I find this imbalance appalling not for the sake of all of the men who will be unable to find wives but for all of the girls who had to die and the mothers who had to kill their daughters to produce the imbalance.

Not even the education and advancement of women seems to stop the trend of terminating baby girls. The stakes only get higher when you're only going to have one or two children in a culture that still values men over women. Then a boy child must be born and baby girls become even more disposable.

Another article discusses the problem in one region of India, from the perspective of the men, Distorted sex ratios in India Haryana's lonely bachelors: Struggling to cope with a dearth of brides. The article ends with this bit of irony,

Meanwhile, the greying bachelors pine on. “I still want a wife,” says Babulal Yadav, a 50-year-old farmer. “I’m used to being alone. But I want a son.”

That desire for a son is the reason why he and others like him can't find a local girl to marry.

This article, Mothers in China Sobs on the night breeze, talks about the lengths to which some families go to dispose of girl children in hopes of having a boy child.

Most of Xinran’s mothers submit stoically to the cruelties of “son preference” and the one-child policy. But a few go to extraordinary lengths to have more than one child. On a train journey she meets one of China’s so-called “extra-birth guerrilla troops”—families with daughters who leave home and move secretly from city to city, hoping to escape the birth-control regulators long enough to produce a son.

The governments of the countries involved are attempting to reverse the trends that could destroy their societies. South Korea was the first nation to realize the danger and reverse the trend bringing their sex ratio closer to the norm (110 to 100). For those other nations that have yet to solve the problem may I suggest an ad campaign along the lines of, "Let your daughters live. They might give birth to boys someday." That way no one has to give up their cultural prejudices against women but the baby girls get to live anyway.