Missing Women

Tuesday’s Boston Globe carries a front page story about gender selection through abortion in India. The story mentions a population study of India published in the British medical journal Lancet. The study estimates a deficit of 10 million females.

The documentation of such hidden killings through population studies has a long tradition. I cannot find a reference myself, but Solzhenitsyn’s “Letter to the Soviet Leaders” speaks of a Russian demographer's population study of the Soviet Union done during the mid-20^th century that indicated 60 million unnatural deaths in the USSR between 1900 and the time of the study. The number was significantly larger than summation of Russian casualties in WWI, the Russian Civil War, and WWII (which alone was over 20 million). The implication of the paper was that something else in addition to these wars had caused many millions of deaths in the USSR. The paper was published in a Soviet journal and later silently expunged. Apparently the author was quite unaware of the scope of murder committed by Lenin, Stalin, and the Soviet Gulag (a fault he shares with many of our contemporaries). The unique work of R.J. Rummel estimates the number at about 62 million for the Soviet period alone, and has a huge list of references.

But I digress. The situation in India is caused by a combination of laws protecting abortion rights and a cultural preference for male offspring. These 10 million killings are to some degree freely chosen. And who is to question that choice? Not the pro-choice lobbies in the West, who are also missing persons on this issue and don’t mention these statistics. But a new Indian law does. The story mentions a new law that forbids dissemination of gender information obtained during ultrasound examinations to expectant mothers. That is a convoluted way to try to correct the deficit of females. The story also contains a poignant quote:

Sabu George, a New Delhi-based public health researcher specializing on gender-selective abortions, said other districts could easily copy Hyderabad's efforts and bring charges against non-compliant operators. But he said the root causes of the problem will take a long time to reverse. ''We live in a very unequal society,” he said. ''Women are not equal on any level. . . . In our society, we also accept violence against women. Violence in America is very open. In India, the violence is often within families. It is socially sanctioned to kill our girls.”

Does he mean socially sanctioned before birth, after, or both? The Globe also apparently published a shorter Reuters story on the same topic in Monday’s edition, which has this quote which is quite unusual for the Globe with respect to abortion.

Fetal sex determination and medical termination of pregnancy based on the sex of the fetus have been illegal since 1994, but [Professor Shirish] Sheth said there is published evidence of rampant female feticide in India where daughters are regarded as a liability. "Female infanticide of the past is refined and honed to a fine skill in this modern guise," Sheth added.

Such a comparison of infanticide and abortion must have been missed by the Globe's editors.