Dear Colleague:

China's ban on sex-selective abortion won't solve her sex imbalance
problem.
 
Steven W. Mosher
President

PRI Weekly Briefing
7 February 2005
Vol. 7 / No. 5

An Impediment to Choice

By Joseph A. D'Agostino

Communist China announced plans last month to criminalize sex-selective
abortion, yet American and international feminist groups-quick to denounce
restrictions on the "right to choose" in any country-did not complain.
Their silence is an extension of the silence they observe on China's
official one-child policy, which since 1979 has forced women who have more
than one child (or two children in many rural areas) to undergo
sterilization or forced abortion.  Feminists' implicit acceptance, and in
some cases endorsement, of China's decision fully accords with the
fundamentally statist, authoritarian worldview of mainstream leftists.
They favor government regulation of almost everything, including abortion
when it suits purposes they favor such as population control.  Their
long-standing support for China's systematically coercive population
control program is proof that reproductive freedom is not their chief
concern.

China's infringement on choice is a classic example of how novel social
experiments always create crises that the government must intervene to
solve.  Socialism begets more socialism, a system of social organization
that does not work-and neither will the ban on sex-selective abortion.
Though anyone, however libertarian, who believes in the sanctity of every
individual human life wants governments to ban abortion in order to
protect unborn children, China has not undertaken this measure out of
concern for the girls who are being disproportionately killed in the womb.
 China's Communist rulers wish not to fulfill their essential government
function of protecting innocent life, but, based on an authoritarian
mindset, to continue to manipulate the Chinese population.

China is missing girls, 40 to 60 million of them, which will leave an
equal number of young Chinese men without wives.  Chinese couples, allowed
to have only one or two children, abort girls in the womb in order to try
for boys later.  Boys are preferred for traditional cultural reasons,
because they support their parents in their old age (girls become part of
their husbands' families when they marry), because they extend the family
line, and because in rural areas, they can perform more labor.  Between
117 and 119 boys are now born in China for every 100 girls when naturally
speaking, 105 boys should be born for every 100 girls (Mother Nature
prefers boys by 5%).  The Chinese government has announced plans to
eliminate the new disparity between male and female births by 2010, just
five years away.

The criminal sex-selective abortion ban seems unlikely to work.  India
criminalized it to no effect: Her sex imbalance at birth has not improved.
 Almost no one gets into legal trouble for sex-selective abortion.  How
could they?  Ultrasounds are taken to monitor the health of unborn
children, so doctors always know their sex.  Parents find out from them,
even though it's illegal for the doctors to reveal it.  Then they exercise
their "right to choose."  Is a preference for one sex over the other any
worse a reason to have an abortion than convenience, or temporary physical
or psychological discomfort?  After all, 98% of abortions in America are
elective by even pro-choice medical standards.

China is also offering parents of one or two girls subsidies in order to
encourage more of them.  So the government will tax some people in order
to pay other people to do what government policy has led them not to do.
It's no wonder that Zhang Yichi, the child whose birth last month
officially raised China's population to 1.3 billion, was a boy.

Birthrates are dropping all over the world with or without coercion, and
few countries have serious sex imbalances.  Fashionably quasi-Marxist
observers like to blame patriarchal attitudes for the imbalances in China
and India, but almost all Third World countries have such attitudes
together with populations that are more than half female.  China and India
have populations that are 48.4% female, even though women's lives average
longer than men's there as well as elsewhere.

If China's government wants to save its country from a dearth of women, it
should abolish its always-evil and now-archaic population control program.

Joseph A. D'Agostino is Vice President for Communications at the
Population Research Institute.

PRI
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Media Contact: Joseph A. D'Agostino
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