What do you think?
Rate this book
Unnatural Selection: Choosing Boys over Girls and the Consequences of a World Full of Men
Lianyungang, a booming port city, has China's most extreme gender ratio for children under four: 163 boys for every 100 girls. These numbers don't seem terribly grim, but in ten years, the skewed sex ratio will pose a colossal challenge. By the time those children reach adulthood, their generation will have twenty-four million more men than women.
The prognosis for China's neighbors is no less bleak: Asia now has 163 million females "missing" from its population. Gender imbalance reaches far beyond Asia, affecting Georgia, Eastern Europe, and cities in the U.S. where there are significant immigrant populations. The world, therefore, is becoming increasingly male, and this mismatch is likely to create profound social upheaval.
Historically, eras in which there have been an excess of men have produced periods of violent conflict and instability. Mara Hvistendahl has written a stunning, impeccably-researched book that does not flinch from examining not only the consequences of the misbegotten policies of sex selection but Western complicity with them.
The prognosis for China's neighbors is no less bleak: Asia now has 163 million females "missing" from its population. Gender imbalance reaches far beyond Asia, affecting Georgia, Eastern Europe, and cities in the U.S. where there are significant immigrant populations. The world, therefore, is becoming increasingly male, and this mismatch is likely to create profound social upheaval.
Historically, eras in which there have been an excess of men have produced periods of violent conflict and instability. Mara Hvistendahl has written a stunning, impeccably-researched book that does not flinch from examining not only the consequences of the misbegotten policies of sex selection but Western complicity with them.
338 pages, Kindle Edition
First published June 7, 2011
About the author
Mara Hvistendahl
10 books97 followersMara Hvistendahl is an award-winning writer and journalist specialized in the intersection of science, culture, and policy. A correspondent for Science magazine, she has also written for Harper’s, Scientific American, Popular Science, The Financial Times, and Foreign Policy, among other publications. Proficient in both Spanish and Chinese, she has spent half of the past decade in China, where she has reported on everything from archaeology to Beijing’s space program.
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 30 of 223 reviews
August 31, 2011
This book brought a very interesting, very troubling problem to light, but I had some major problems with it. First of all, I felt like Hvistendahl spent a huge amount of time trying to say that cultural practices and gender preference in Asian countries (mostly--some eastern European countries as well, she made that point very clear) was NOT the overall cause of skewed gender ratios, that instead technological advancements and the imposition of western population controls were the cause. However, she seemed to shoot her own argument in the foot. Yes, people were using technological advancements because of population controls to choose male babies. But the fact remains that they were choosing male babies. The population controls did not force people to value male children over females. That was the culture. The final chapter of the book, which talks about gender selection in the United States, shows people using advanced technologies to select for female babies.
Finally, I have a big problem with Hvistendahl's attitude toward abortion. She spends multiple chapters and countless anecdotes to illustrate the horrible abuses that are being perpetrated through abortion, and she takes a very moralistic tone when describing the hypocrisy of Western societies who are imposing abortions on their eastern counterparts. But then she continually defends abortion and states repeatedly her pro-choice stance on the matter. I found her attitude to be extremely hypocritical. I honestly feel like Hvistendahl was rather conflicted herself--the evidence seemed to be pointing toward one thing, but she couldn't overcome her inborn biases in order to accept that. I know that a lot of people are going to have a problem with me because of that, but there it is.
Finally, I have a big problem with Hvistendahl's attitude toward abortion. She spends multiple chapters and countless anecdotes to illustrate the horrible abuses that are being perpetrated through abortion, and she takes a very moralistic tone when describing the hypocrisy of Western societies who are imposing abortions on their eastern counterparts. But then she continually defends abortion and states repeatedly her pro-choice stance on the matter. I found her attitude to be extremely hypocritical. I honestly feel like Hvistendahl was rather conflicted herself--the evidence seemed to be pointing toward one thing, but she couldn't overcome her inborn biases in order to accept that. I know that a lot of people are going to have a problem with me because of that, but there it is.
August 16, 2011
I wanted to like this more than I did. On the one hand, Hvistendahl identifies a startling phenomenon, widespread sex-selective abortion, that raises a host of troubling ethical and practical issues. She is to be credited for bringing these issues to light.
But I found her analysis of the origins of the problem a bit simplistic, discounting cultural preferences for male children and focusing instead on technological changes and external pressures to lower overall fertility. They're all part of the story, clearly, but by treating it sex-selective abortion as basically the result of Western actions, Hvistendahl underestimates the underlying impulse to favor male children in some Asian societies. This inattention to culture also leads Hvistendahl to treat sex-selective abortion as a single global phenomenon rather than a set of similar practices across the world.
There's also a clunker of a chapter that looks to history to explain the problems of heavily male societies that could have been removed without hurting the book at all.
In short, a powerful and necessary book, but also one that falls short. Still, anyone interested in global population issues, abortion, and the relationship between policy elites should read this.
But I found her analysis of the origins of the problem a bit simplistic, discounting cultural preferences for male children and focusing instead on technological changes and external pressures to lower overall fertility. They're all part of the story, clearly, but by treating it sex-selective abortion as basically the result of Western actions, Hvistendahl underestimates the underlying impulse to favor male children in some Asian societies. This inattention to culture also leads Hvistendahl to treat sex-selective abortion as a single global phenomenon rather than a set of similar practices across the world.
There's also a clunker of a chapter that looks to history to explain the problems of heavily male societies that could have been removed without hurting the book at all.
In short, a powerful and necessary book, but also one that falls short. Still, anyone interested in global population issues, abortion, and the relationship between policy elites should read this.
July 25, 2012
This book is making me stabby! Every few pages I have to set it down and make some out-loud remarks about the whole f-ed up situation and how it got that way. The fact that I'm usually alone probably makes me look a little crazy, but at least I haven't been reading in public!
A few quotes(to explain the stabbiness):
"Between January 1981, shortly after the [one-child] policy was introduced, and December 1986, Chinese women underwent 67 million abortions." (p.147)
"Mao Zedong once said that women hold up half the sky, and until I moved to China I believed it....It was only after I moved to China to work as a journalist...that I started to dwell on the societal implications of a population with tens of millions more men than women....I didn't understand it. But it was clear the sky was sagging." (p. xi, xiii)
"Women might have to be locked up, or forced to marry multiple men, or traded like commodities, but sex selection [choosing boy babies over girl babies] was advisable, he suggested, for 'the only really important problem facing humanity to-day is over-population,' particularly in 'under-developed unenlightened communities.'" (p.103)
During his first night of rounds as a medical student in India in 1978, Dr. Bedi recalls seeing a stray cat run past him with an aborted fetus in its mouth. "He told a nurse, then a doctor. Or maybe it was a doctor, then a nurse. I saw a cat eat a fetus. Nobody on duty seemed concerned, however, and finally he got on with his post...But then finally he worked up the nerve to approach the head doctor with the mystery. Why had he seen a cat run off with what looked like fetal matter? And why had the fetus not been disposed of more carefully? Bedi says the nurse's explanation came out cold, her voice matter-of-fact. 'Because it was a girl,' she said." (p.79-80)
In the 1970s, researchers discovered that a baby's sex could be determined through amniocentesis testing. At a hospital in China, doctors reported that out of 100 attempts, they had successfully determined the sex of 93 fetuses. "Of the ninety-three women who had their fetus's sex determined, thirty chose to abort. Of those thirty, twenty-nine were carrying girls." (p12)
I started this book with a pre-conceived attitude of, "Way to go, China," but the problem of skewed sex ratios (number of boys to number of girls) is so much more widespread than just China, and, as it turns out, the U.S. and other Western nations had a pretty heavy hand in setting all this into motion.
I know it sounds like this book has the potential to be agenda-heavy regarding abortion, and there is a lot (A LOT) of talk about, abortion since it is the primary method used to get rid of unwanted girl children, but abortion itself is not really the issue. Whether you're for or against it, the problem goes a lot deeper than just whether abortion should be legal, and, so far, the author has done a pretty good job of staying neutral on the topic.
A few quotes(to explain the stabbiness):
"Between January 1981, shortly after the [one-child] policy was introduced, and December 1986, Chinese women underwent 67 million abortions." (p.147)
"Mao Zedong once said that women hold up half the sky, and until I moved to China I believed it....It was only after I moved to China to work as a journalist...that I started to dwell on the societal implications of a population with tens of millions more men than women....I didn't understand it. But it was clear the sky was sagging." (p. xi, xiii)
"Women might have to be locked up, or forced to marry multiple men, or traded like commodities, but sex selection [choosing boy babies over girl babies] was advisable, he suggested, for 'the only really important problem facing humanity to-day is over-population,' particularly in 'under-developed unenlightened communities.'" (p.103)
During his first night of rounds as a medical student in India in 1978, Dr. Bedi recalls seeing a stray cat run past him with an aborted fetus in its mouth. "He told a nurse, then a doctor. Or maybe it was a doctor, then a nurse. I saw a cat eat a fetus. Nobody on duty seemed concerned, however, and finally he got on with his post...But then finally he worked up the nerve to approach the head doctor with the mystery. Why had he seen a cat run off with what looked like fetal matter? And why had the fetus not been disposed of more carefully? Bedi says the nurse's explanation came out cold, her voice matter-of-fact. 'Because it was a girl,' she said." (p.79-80)
In the 1970s, researchers discovered that a baby's sex could be determined through amniocentesis testing. At a hospital in China, doctors reported that out of 100 attempts, they had successfully determined the sex of 93 fetuses. "Of the ninety-three women who had their fetus's sex determined, thirty chose to abort. Of those thirty, twenty-nine were carrying girls." (p12)
I started this book with a pre-conceived attitude of, "Way to go, China," but the problem of skewed sex ratios (number of boys to number of girls) is so much more widespread than just China, and, as it turns out, the U.S. and other Western nations had a pretty heavy hand in setting all this into motion.
I know it sounds like this book has the potential to be agenda-heavy regarding abortion, and there is a lot (A LOT) of talk about, abortion since it is the primary method used to get rid of unwanted girl children, but abortion itself is not really the issue. Whether you're for or against it, the problem goes a lot deeper than just whether abortion should be legal, and, so far, the author has done a pretty good job of staying neutral on the topic.
August 16, 2011
Hvistendahl is a good journalist who vividly paints the whole sordid backstory of Western complicity in Asian sex selection practices (usually abortion, and usually coerced). She also takes theorists to task for their portrayal of sex selection as an exclusively Asian practice that has to do with Asian culture. When the same problem is happening in places as far flung as Albania and Georgia (the country), something other than "local customs" has to be the culprit. The pattern that emerges is a developing country with greater economic opportunities leads to a lower fertility rate. The lower fertility rate leads to sex selection, mostly in the second or third births if the first birth was a girl. The rich have access to the technology first, but then as the technology becomes cheaper, the poor eventually adopt the same customs. Finally, the birth rate lowers so dramatically that the sex ratio evens out as couples only have one child.
But what does it all mean? While the author does a great job of explaining how prostitution or polyandry or forced/arranged/bought marriages develop as a result of the glut of single men, that doesn't answer the larger question. Why do all these cultures choose boys? Only at the very end of the book does she mention that a campaign targeted at making US parents choose boys (since the IVF clinics that offer sex selection here are largely producing girls) would not be successful. Parents don't want a certain sex for the baby - they want a certain image of that sex for their child. Whether it be a responsible man who provides for his parents (as in Asia) or a girl to wear frilly pink dresses (as in the US), it's the gender not the sex that parents are selecting for. So...now what? This book poses some interesting questions, but it does not offer specific solutions.
But what does it all mean? While the author does a great job of explaining how prostitution or polyandry or forced/arranged/bought marriages develop as a result of the glut of single men, that doesn't answer the larger question. Why do all these cultures choose boys? Only at the very end of the book does she mention that a campaign targeted at making US parents choose boys (since the IVF clinics that offer sex selection here are largely producing girls) would not be successful. Parents don't want a certain sex for the baby - they want a certain image of that sex for their child. Whether it be a responsible man who provides for his parents (as in Asia) or a girl to wear frilly pink dresses (as in the US), it's the gender not the sex that parents are selecting for. So...now what? This book poses some interesting questions, but it does not offer specific solutions.
October 24, 2017
This unfolds the terrifying future of a world with more men than women, because of the cheaply and widely availability of ultrasounds in the 1980s. At the same time women in India and China came under restrictions from their governments to only have 1 child, many selected to abort females and give birth to a male. Now these countries have skewed sexual populations.
There has always been a preference for male children, as the boy carries on the family name and the father's genes, but now it has been scientifically and socially brought to a horrifying conclusion--160 million female babies have been aborted in Asia alone (China and India), only 25 million poeple have died from AIDS since the disease was unleashed.
People first became aware of the problem in the 1990s when the Nobel prize winning economist Amartya Sen wrote an article for The New York Review of Books, entitled, "More than 100 Million Women are Missing."
Also, sadly, women's value and worth does not go up during such a crisis, but historically has been lowered, the result is sex trafficking, bride buying, forced marriages, and violence against women.
There has always been a preference for male children, as the boy carries on the family name and the father's genes, but now it has been scientifically and socially brought to a horrifying conclusion--160 million female babies have been aborted in Asia alone (China and India), only 25 million poeple have died from AIDS since the disease was unleashed.
People first became aware of the problem in the 1990s when the Nobel prize winning economist Amartya Sen wrote an article for The New York Review of Books, entitled, "More than 100 Million Women are Missing."
Also, sadly, women's value and worth does not go up during such a crisis, but historically has been lowered, the result is sex trafficking, bride buying, forced marriages, and violence against women.
January 19, 2012
160 million -- that's how many missing women there are in Asia due to sex-selection abortion. This book was fascinating to read, though quite flawed in some of its premises and conclusions.
Interestingly enough, the phenomenon is not happening in most Asian countries when a couple has their first child -- the first children ratios are largely normal. It's when a second child is born that a family decides that "this time, we want a boy." (p. 43). Falling birthrates in all of these countries mean more pressure on parents to have their "ideal family" that consists of at least one boy.
China, Korea, India and most Asian countries have a cultural preference for boy children. As much as the author tries to downplay the cultural part of the phenomenon by pointing out that a few Western countries -- Armenia and Georgia, for example, also select for boys, and then pointing to all the factors that went into the encouragement of abortion as a means of population control, the fact remains that when given the "choice," mothers and fathers are aborting their female children by the millions. The author's "it's not cultural" argument really breaks down when you consider that she even presents that Asians living in America are not only more likely to have abortions than American women generally, they also "select" for boys while Americans don't -- 35% of Asian-American pregnancies end in abortion, twice that of whites. Their sex selection rates are about right for first children, 117 boys to girls for second children, and 151 for third children. (p.43-44)
In parts of China today, the ratios are especially skewed. Where naturally, 105 boys are born for every 100 girls, in the city Lianyungang, there are 163 boys for every 100 girls. In Yichan, there are 137. In Fangchenggang, 153, and in Tianmen, 176. (p. 23)
But while the author's argument against culture falls flat, there is no doubt that Western arm-twisting and the population alarmists absolutely were involved heavily in promoting and encouraging abortion as a means of reducing the population "threat." The chapters on how horribly and unethically their tactics were are eye-opening and disgusting. South Korea's "don't have children" campaign was especially coercive and also effective -- by 1977, there were 2.75 abortions in that country for every live birth (p. 133). Today, South Korea is about the only country in Asia that DOESN'T have an abnormal birth ratio of boys to girls, but the author points out that the change is largely because South Korean's aren't having babies at all -- their birthrate has fallen incredibly low, to 1.6 children per woman.
As the author points out in detail in country after country, Western NGOs (Planned Parenthood, the UNFPA) and others put pressure on Asian countries to reduce their populations anyway they can. China jumped on the bandwagon especially hard, introducing their "one child" policy in the late 70s. By 1982, 40% of pregnancies in China ended in abortion, many of them forced. Funding from IPPF (international planned parenthood) only increased in China, and a student at Stanford who tried to bring attention to the forced abortions happening was expelled. (p. 144-145). To the population control people, fewer babies born was a great outcome, and it didn't matter what methods were used to reduce the population.
Some of the consequences of the Asian world where men largely outnumber women were explored and the consequences for women's rights and a civil society is devastating -- bride-buying, sex trafficing, girls kidnapped and sold into prostitution, men unable to find wives, poorer countries being emptied of their women who migrate (by choice or not, many of them sold by their families) to richer countries, etc. I haven't read the Bare Branches book referenced by the author here, but I found her dismissive attitude towards its conclusions (that a young, unattached male population is a security threat/war waiting to happen) interesting in light of the other problems she is showing are already happening. I would expect that premise explored in depth.
Sex-selection is an issue that is largely ignored by the left, as the author laments (along with an attack on the right for using it as a tool to fight abortion -- hmmm, you think?). The author is very, very careful throughout the book to keep her liberal street cred -- using sanitized terms like "sex selection" and "selected" rather than "terminated" or "killed," but the fact remains that in a culture where killing an unborn baby is not considered a real death, the fact that women use their "choice" to kill female babies in astounding rates is very embarrassing for the feminist movement. And mentioning the downsides of pro-choice is very dicey to discuss. The author suggests that maybe in the future, the left could frame the debate around issues of the health problems caused by multiple late-term abortions rather than bringing up the morality of abortion. After all, the implication is, abortion isn't wrong; it's just these pesky consequences of its availability.
One of the most telling paragraphs (and bold for the author) in the book was this one: "Trepidation about the 'A-word,' however, has also immobilized the very people who should be crying oppression. Longtime gender activist Gita Sen recently told a journalist, 'The biggest danger, which is the one we're dealing with right now, is that the anti-sex selection campaigns not turn into an anti-abortion campaigns.' One might respond that the biggest danger we are facing is a dramatic reduction in the number of women and girls -- that sex trafficking, bride buying, and general instability, when they arrive all at once, amount to one whopping danger In a world in which women are unnaturally scarce, the right to abort will be the least of our worries."
Interestingly enough, the phenomenon is not happening in most Asian countries when a couple has their first child -- the first children ratios are largely normal. It's when a second child is born that a family decides that "this time, we want a boy." (p. 43). Falling birthrates in all of these countries mean more pressure on parents to have their "ideal family" that consists of at least one boy.
China, Korea, India and most Asian countries have a cultural preference for boy children. As much as the author tries to downplay the cultural part of the phenomenon by pointing out that a few Western countries -- Armenia and Georgia, for example, also select for boys, and then pointing to all the factors that went into the encouragement of abortion as a means of population control, the fact remains that when given the "choice," mothers and fathers are aborting their female children by the millions. The author's "it's not cultural" argument really breaks down when you consider that she even presents that Asians living in America are not only more likely to have abortions than American women generally, they also "select" for boys while Americans don't -- 35% of Asian-American pregnancies end in abortion, twice that of whites. Their sex selection rates are about right for first children, 117 boys to girls for second children, and 151 for third children. (p.43-44)
In parts of China today, the ratios are especially skewed. Where naturally, 105 boys are born for every 100 girls, in the city Lianyungang, there are 163 boys for every 100 girls. In Yichan, there are 137. In Fangchenggang, 153, and in Tianmen, 176. (p. 23)
But while the author's argument against culture falls flat, there is no doubt that Western arm-twisting and the population alarmists absolutely were involved heavily in promoting and encouraging abortion as a means of reducing the population "threat." The chapters on how horribly and unethically their tactics were are eye-opening and disgusting. South Korea's "don't have children" campaign was especially coercive and also effective -- by 1977, there were 2.75 abortions in that country for every live birth (p. 133). Today, South Korea is about the only country in Asia that DOESN'T have an abnormal birth ratio of boys to girls, but the author points out that the change is largely because South Korean's aren't having babies at all -- their birthrate has fallen incredibly low, to 1.6 children per woman.
As the author points out in detail in country after country, Western NGOs (Planned Parenthood, the UNFPA) and others put pressure on Asian countries to reduce their populations anyway they can. China jumped on the bandwagon especially hard, introducing their "one child" policy in the late 70s. By 1982, 40% of pregnancies in China ended in abortion, many of them forced. Funding from IPPF (international planned parenthood) only increased in China, and a student at Stanford who tried to bring attention to the forced abortions happening was expelled. (p. 144-145). To the population control people, fewer babies born was a great outcome, and it didn't matter what methods were used to reduce the population.
Some of the consequences of the Asian world where men largely outnumber women were explored and the consequences for women's rights and a civil society is devastating -- bride-buying, sex trafficing, girls kidnapped and sold into prostitution, men unable to find wives, poorer countries being emptied of their women who migrate (by choice or not, many of them sold by their families) to richer countries, etc. I haven't read the Bare Branches book referenced by the author here, but I found her dismissive attitude towards its conclusions (that a young, unattached male population is a security threat/war waiting to happen) interesting in light of the other problems she is showing are already happening. I would expect that premise explored in depth.
Sex-selection is an issue that is largely ignored by the left, as the author laments (along with an attack on the right for using it as a tool to fight abortion -- hmmm, you think?). The author is very, very careful throughout the book to keep her liberal street cred -- using sanitized terms like "sex selection" and "selected" rather than "terminated" or "killed," but the fact remains that in a culture where killing an unborn baby is not considered a real death, the fact that women use their "choice" to kill female babies in astounding rates is very embarrassing for the feminist movement. And mentioning the downsides of pro-choice is very dicey to discuss. The author suggests that maybe in the future, the left could frame the debate around issues of the health problems caused by multiple late-term abortions rather than bringing up the morality of abortion. After all, the implication is, abortion isn't wrong; it's just these pesky consequences of its availability.
One of the most telling paragraphs (and bold for the author) in the book was this one: "Trepidation about the 'A-word,' however, has also immobilized the very people who should be crying oppression. Longtime gender activist Gita Sen recently told a journalist, 'The biggest danger, which is the one we're dealing with right now, is that the anti-sex selection campaigns not turn into an anti-abortion campaigns.' One might respond that the biggest danger we are facing is a dramatic reduction in the number of women and girls -- that sex trafficking, bride buying, and general instability, when they arrive all at once, amount to one whopping danger In a world in which women are unnaturally scarce, the right to abort will be the least of our worries."
Read
January 16, 2013Fascinating examination of sex selection, abortion and family size. Hvistendahl does a good job in poking a flashlight into the different, murky corners of the issue, thought there aren't any obvious answers. I was taught, like a good geographer, the solid old model of demographic transition:
...and the teacher or professor occasionally adding on that squiggly line at the bottom right as an aside. Now, with most of the world well over into the right half of the graph, it looks like we might need to zoom into that line, because weird stuff is going on there, particularly in regard to gender.
Theres a tangled mix here - on the one hand, it's possible to draw a broad socio-technologo-economic continuation to the model, as inexorable as the tide - rising affluence, easy availability of high tech ultrasounds, shrinking families, a preference for boys - voila, a predictable pattern on the graph. It returns to normal as the transition into prosperity is completed (see: South Korea, the only place on earth known to have gotten back to a normal sex-at-birth ratio.)
But then there are the conscious-human things, with people recognizing the problematic choices they make but making them anyway, and laws and propaganda and celebrity endorsements and what have you. Did the one-child law affect things? Vietnam doesn't have a one-child law, and it's fertility has dropped even more sharply than China. (So has Iran.) Why DID South Korea balance back? Why hasn't Taiwan? How does lowest-low fertility, which many of these countries are heading to, affect things? Whats going on in Eastern Europe compared to the Caucauses? What's with the slight anti-boy-selection phenomenon in the USA?
In short, the book raises more demographic questions than it answers, but they're very good questions.
And then theres the politics - there is the long (and often unpleasantly racist) history of western involvement in Asian demographics, wearing seemingly benign but utterly creepy hats, hyperventilating about the world being overrun by the Eastern Horde, (I used to do environmental workshops, back in...2012. The attitude among infallibly liberal 20-something students who really, really care about the planet to the possibility of rising standards of living in the developing world was often not particularly far off from the World Bank or Republican Party in the 70's.) Then there are Asian governments themselves, cooperating with a genuine eye to economic growth, that together went a long way to normalizing abortion in the first place. The way this runs into anti-abortion politics is complex and, unsurprisingly, unpleasant. Clearly, women being forced to have abortions in the 70's means they should have less control of their bodies today.
The part that should have been most interesting, but felt a little underdeveloped to me, was the question of the future though. Hvistendahl dedicated a chunk of the book to asking what the world looks like - and will look like - with this already extant and unreversible overly-male generation alive and well into adulthood, but she doesn't go nearly far enough. Maybe it's because there aren't any good answers yet, only the ability to take a very narrow look at a few inevitable phenomenon on the small scale, with no ability to step back and ask But What Does It Mean - but maybe that's because i'm a Science Fiction reader, actually. (An Ian McDonald future-India short story does get a passing mention.) Speculate, people, speculate!
Anyway, very well written, in that engaging journalistic way but without being shallow. Hvistendahl lays out her agenda front and center and never tries to hide it or her own personality and background, and gives room for a personal story, a bit of scene setting or a character sketch whenever things threaten to get bogged down in buereaucratic history or too many statistics.
The book ends up being a bit depressing, of course, like all the books about global warming, peak oil, viral immunity and genetic modification and whatever else is threatening us. The future will be bleak, but we already knew that - I suppose it won't just be hotter, poorer and slower, it will also be harder to get laid. Then again, who knows, maybe we'll deal. One way or another, it's going to happen.
...and the teacher or professor occasionally adding on that squiggly line at the bottom right as an aside. Now, with most of the world well over into the right half of the graph, it looks like we might need to zoom into that line, because weird stuff is going on there, particularly in regard to gender.
Theres a tangled mix here - on the one hand, it's possible to draw a broad socio-technologo-economic continuation to the model, as inexorable as the tide - rising affluence, easy availability of high tech ultrasounds, shrinking families, a preference for boys - voila, a predictable pattern on the graph. It returns to normal as the transition into prosperity is completed (see: South Korea, the only place on earth known to have gotten back to a normal sex-at-birth ratio.)
But then there are the conscious-human things, with people recognizing the problematic choices they make but making them anyway, and laws and propaganda and celebrity endorsements and what have you. Did the one-child law affect things? Vietnam doesn't have a one-child law, and it's fertility has dropped even more sharply than China. (So has Iran.) Why DID South Korea balance back? Why hasn't Taiwan? How does lowest-low fertility, which many of these countries are heading to, affect things? Whats going on in Eastern Europe compared to the Caucauses? What's with the slight anti-boy-selection phenomenon in the USA?
In short, the book raises more demographic questions than it answers, but they're very good questions.
And then theres the politics - there is the long (and often unpleasantly racist) history of western involvement in Asian demographics, wearing seemingly benign but utterly creepy hats, hyperventilating about the world being overrun by the Eastern Horde, (I used to do environmental workshops, back in...2012. The attitude among infallibly liberal 20-something students who really, really care about the planet to the possibility of rising standards of living in the developing world was often not particularly far off from the World Bank or Republican Party in the 70's.) Then there are Asian governments themselves, cooperating with a genuine eye to economic growth, that together went a long way to normalizing abortion in the first place. The way this runs into anti-abortion politics is complex and, unsurprisingly, unpleasant. Clearly, women being forced to have abortions in the 70's means they should have less control of their bodies today.
The part that should have been most interesting, but felt a little underdeveloped to me, was the question of the future though. Hvistendahl dedicated a chunk of the book to asking what the world looks like - and will look like - with this already extant and unreversible overly-male generation alive and well into adulthood, but she doesn't go nearly far enough. Maybe it's because there aren't any good answers yet, only the ability to take a very narrow look at a few inevitable phenomenon on the small scale, with no ability to step back and ask But What Does It Mean - but maybe that's because i'm a Science Fiction reader, actually. (An Ian McDonald future-India short story does get a passing mention.) Speculate, people, speculate!
Anyway, very well written, in that engaging journalistic way but without being shallow. Hvistendahl lays out her agenda front and center and never tries to hide it or her own personality and background, and gives room for a personal story, a bit of scene setting or a character sketch whenever things threaten to get bogged down in buereaucratic history or too many statistics.
The book ends up being a bit depressing, of course, like all the books about global warming, peak oil, viral immunity and genetic modification and whatever else is threatening us. The future will be bleak, but we already knew that - I suppose it won't just be hotter, poorer and slower, it will also be harder to get laid. Then again, who knows, maybe we'll deal. One way or another, it's going to happen.
August 14, 2011
I had heard about families selecting for male babies in India and China, but this book turned out to be more informative and eye-opening than I expected, not just about the problem of societies with more men than women, but population control in general. It’s well known now that in Asia people abuse the new medical technologies to screen for sons. Much has been duly said about sexism and cultural biases for having sons. What is less known is how and why this cultural bias was allowed to be practiced so commonly and who was really behind it.
You’d be surprised to learn that the whole obsession with population control had its root in the Cold War thinking that overpopulation bred poverty and poverty was a breeding ground for Communism. (These days poverty breeds Islamic fundamentalism, according to the same institutions.) The West set out to control the population in Asia. With their advice and money, Indira Gandhi forcibly sterilized eight million men during The Emergency. The first help that China got after the normalization of relations with the U.S. was money and technology for population control. Selecting for boys in the form of aborting female fetuses was allowed and quietly encouraged because it was thought to be a double whammy: not only it reduces the population of the current generation by killing off many girls; it also reduces the number of mothers in the next generation.
Now these same countries realize that they have a big problem on their hand. It is estimated that 20% of Chinese men will be “surplus” by 2020, i.e., there simply won’t be any women for them in the population. Even now many men from Taiwan and South Korea import poor Vietnamese girls for wives. Wealthier Chinese and Indians literally buy wives from the poor regions. In a perverse division of reproduction responsibilities, poor families who can’t afford sex-determining exams and sex-selective abortions are providing girls for the higher classes – their own men be damned. Hvistendahl spends a few chapters on what a disturbing social force these young single men can be. I didn’t need any convincing. Just thinking about it is scary.
Interestingly, with the advent of preimplantation genetic diagnosis (sperm separation and artificial insemination to select the sex of the baby) in the U.S. – especially in California – the trend has become the opposite. That is, wealthy prospective mothers who can afford this technology are primarily selecting for girls. The reasons that are given can only come from California women: barrettes and pink dresses and going shopping for clothes with their daughters, etc. I have a feeling that these are the same type of women who a few years later will undergo surgeries and endure draconian diet and exercise plans to fight nature and try to look like their teenage daughters.
You’d be surprised to learn that the whole obsession with population control had its root in the Cold War thinking that overpopulation bred poverty and poverty was a breeding ground for Communism. (These days poverty breeds Islamic fundamentalism, according to the same institutions.) The West set out to control the population in Asia. With their advice and money, Indira Gandhi forcibly sterilized eight million men during The Emergency. The first help that China got after the normalization of relations with the U.S. was money and technology for population control. Selecting for boys in the form of aborting female fetuses was allowed and quietly encouraged because it was thought to be a double whammy: not only it reduces the population of the current generation by killing off many girls; it also reduces the number of mothers in the next generation.
Now these same countries realize that they have a big problem on their hand. It is estimated that 20% of Chinese men will be “surplus” by 2020, i.e., there simply won’t be any women for them in the population. Even now many men from Taiwan and South Korea import poor Vietnamese girls for wives. Wealthier Chinese and Indians literally buy wives from the poor regions. In a perverse division of reproduction responsibilities, poor families who can’t afford sex-determining exams and sex-selective abortions are providing girls for the higher classes – their own men be damned. Hvistendahl spends a few chapters on what a disturbing social force these young single men can be. I didn’t need any convincing. Just thinking about it is scary.
Interestingly, with the advent of preimplantation genetic diagnosis (sperm separation and artificial insemination to select the sex of the baby) in the U.S. – especially in California – the trend has become the opposite. That is, wealthy prospective mothers who can afford this technology are primarily selecting for girls. The reasons that are given can only come from California women: barrettes and pink dresses and going shopping for clothes with their daughters, etc. I have a feeling that these are the same type of women who a few years later will undergo surgeries and endure draconian diet and exercise plans to fight nature and try to look like their teenage daughters.
July 12, 2017
How to organize my thoughts on this....
Sex selective abortion is an issue. Choosing male fetuses over female fetuses is highly dangerous for us in the long run (but not just because men are uncontrollable hormonal monsters, like Hvistendahl seems to present - but seriously, Hvistendahl...? I'll come back to this). The West did indeed push population control on PoC throughout the East because we're fucking horrible racists with a terrible track record of colonialism.
But. But. Hvistendahl argues that sexism is not the root cause of sex selective abortion, and I absolutely cannot wrap my mind around how she figures that! Yes, the West was the one to introduce the technology and the restrictive laws that allowed sex selective abortion to become so prevalent. But The West did not introduce the sexist mindset that underlies the missing girls in the East. Patriarchal attitudes were well established in the East long, long, long before the West began meddling.
Hvistendahl also seems to think that men cannot control themselves unless they settle down with a nice woman and have babies. The entire chapter on the repercussions of surplus men draws on historical evidence that's shaky at best; modern times are not as violent as the Roman era. Violence has been on the decline for the entirety of history, even if mass media makes us think that there's a murderer around every corner. To say that surplus men cannot control themselves in the face of fewer women, that no cultural shift can offer men better outlets than kidnapping, raping, and murdering what women remain, is to do men a huge disservice.
I wanted to enjoy this book, but Hvistendahl obviously has an axe to grind. She isn't impartial; this book isn't just a presentation of the facts; she tends to dramatic lines that attempt to evoke a specifically sympathetic response from the reader. Why else repeatedly mention how a researcher took a stiff drink throughout your interview (in a culture where drinking strong liquor is normal and accepted as a past time, for fuck's sake). I am an extremely liberal person but I have no patience for this sort of manipulative nonsense.
I could go on but I won't. Worth a read if you're willing to do some serious critical thinking on the material she presents, because you'll have to try and rearrange it to see it outside of her frame of reference.
tl;dr, Hvistendahl did do plenty of research, this book isn't terrible, but she is not an impartial writer.
Sex selective abortion is an issue. Choosing male fetuses over female fetuses is highly dangerous for us in the long run (but not just because men are uncontrollable hormonal monsters, like Hvistendahl seems to present - but seriously, Hvistendahl...? I'll come back to this). The West did indeed push population control on PoC throughout the East because we're fucking horrible racists with a terrible track record of colonialism.
But. But. Hvistendahl argues that sexism is not the root cause of sex selective abortion, and I absolutely cannot wrap my mind around how she figures that! Yes, the West was the one to introduce the technology and the restrictive laws that allowed sex selective abortion to become so prevalent. But The West did not introduce the sexist mindset that underlies the missing girls in the East. Patriarchal attitudes were well established in the East long, long, long before the West began meddling.
Hvistendahl also seems to think that men cannot control themselves unless they settle down with a nice woman and have babies. The entire chapter on the repercussions of surplus men draws on historical evidence that's shaky at best; modern times are not as violent as the Roman era. Violence has been on the decline for the entirety of history, even if mass media makes us think that there's a murderer around every corner. To say that surplus men cannot control themselves in the face of fewer women, that no cultural shift can offer men better outlets than kidnapping, raping, and murdering what women remain, is to do men a huge disservice.
I wanted to enjoy this book, but Hvistendahl obviously has an axe to grind. She isn't impartial; this book isn't just a presentation of the facts; she tends to dramatic lines that attempt to evoke a specifically sympathetic response from the reader. Why else repeatedly mention how a researcher took a stiff drink throughout your interview (in a culture where drinking strong liquor is normal and accepted as a past time, for fuck's sake). I am an extremely liberal person but I have no patience for this sort of manipulative nonsense.
I could go on but I won't. Worth a read if you're willing to do some serious critical thinking on the material she presents, because you'll have to try and rearrange it to see it outside of her frame of reference.
tl;dr, Hvistendahl did do plenty of research, this book isn't terrible, but she is not an impartial writer.
April 14, 2020
Disappointing book about an interesting issue. The author pretty much blames the west for pushing population control and technology on the countries in question. While I do think the first world's desire to control population in other parts of the world is detrimental, the author seriously downplays the impact the culture has on the desire for boys. Her solution seems to be to limit access and crack down on ultrasound technology, and punish sex-selective abortions. Awful conclusion, when she herself points out that in America couples want to have girls, because we see women as having more chances at happiness. Until mothers and controlling mothers-in-law in these countries see hope for female children, nothing gonna change.
The last part of the book on the ramifications of a world without women is interesting, focusing on forced prostitution and the trend of women as chattel. In the male-dominated societies, families import women from cheaper parts of the world, so its men in Vietnam who are suffering the consequences of sex selective abortion, while the countries who perpetrate the imbalance live free of consequences.
The last part of the book on the ramifications of a world without women is interesting, focusing on forced prostitution and the trend of women as chattel. In the male-dominated societies, families import women from cheaper parts of the world, so its men in Vietnam who are suffering the consequences of sex selective abortion, while the countries who perpetrate the imbalance live free of consequences.
October 4, 2011
Have you thought about gender ratios? Untampered with, the gender ratio tends to be 105:100; 105 boys are born for every 100 girls. Eventually, that ratio tends to even out since boys are more likely to meet untimely deaths. Nature has it all figured out.
Now, in many developing countries, that ratio is heavily skewed toward boys. In one province in China, the ratio is 163:100. Most cultures favor male children. Where do the missing girls go? It's true that many are left exposed to the elements to die, or abandoned at orphanages, but author Mara Hvistendahl makes a good case for the idea that vast majority of those missing girls are simply never born at all. Inexpensive ultrasounds and abortions allow parents to create their dream families. Women are discriminated against even in the womb.
Do I sound upset? Because, yeah, I'm kind of upset.
About two-thirds of this book describes the events, the trends, the people and the advances in technology that have brought us to this point. However, I was more interested in the last third of the book that dealt with the possible consequences of "a world full of men." In the end, while these consequences (you'll have to read the book to find out what they are) were unsettling to me, I was most upset by this: that women are told over and over again, in a myriad of ways, that we are not as important as or as good as men.
Why do I read books like this? I think it's important to remind myself that the default status of women is, to be blunt, crap. Things have gotten better, at least in rich countries (though there is always room for improvement), but in the rest of the world, women tend to live in hellish conditions. Books like this have encouraged me to support charities that focus on women (THARCE-Gulu, for example). When I'm short on funds, I try to think about the messages I'm sending to my daughter or simply pray for the women in the world. It's not much, but it's better than nothing.
Now, in many developing countries, that ratio is heavily skewed toward boys. In one province in China, the ratio is 163:100. Most cultures favor male children. Where do the missing girls go? It's true that many are left exposed to the elements to die, or abandoned at orphanages, but author Mara Hvistendahl makes a good case for the idea that vast majority of those missing girls are simply never born at all. Inexpensive ultrasounds and abortions allow parents to create their dream families. Women are discriminated against even in the womb.
Do I sound upset? Because, yeah, I'm kind of upset.
About two-thirds of this book describes the events, the trends, the people and the advances in technology that have brought us to this point. However, I was more interested in the last third of the book that dealt with the possible consequences of "a world full of men." In the end, while these consequences (you'll have to read the book to find out what they are) were unsettling to me, I was most upset by this: that women are told over and over again, in a myriad of ways, that we are not as important as or as good as men.
Why do I read books like this? I think it's important to remind myself that the default status of women is, to be blunt, crap. Things have gotten better, at least in rich countries (though there is always room for improvement), but in the rest of the world, women tend to live in hellish conditions. Books like this have encouraged me to support charities that focus on women (THARCE-Gulu, for example). When I'm short on funds, I try to think about the messages I'm sending to my daughter or simply pray for the women in the world. It's not much, but it's better than nothing.
February 16, 2017
This is a fascinating, well-written, and dare I say "must-read" book. There are 160 million Asian women missing, as Hvistendahl puts it. This is more women than live in the entire United States. The culprit, she argues, is sex-selective abortion.
She documents how as technologies such as ultrasound made their way into places like China, South Korea, and India people were able to choose to abort a baby if they did not want the gender. To put it more bluntly, mostly they wanted boys so if it was a girl they aborted it (actually, if it was the first pregnancy they would keep a girl, but the chances of having a girl on subsequent pregnancy went way down). This has led to a huge absence of women which is resulting in, and will do so more in the future, in things like buying brides from poorer areas and increased human trafficking for forced prostitution.
Throughout the book she talks about how sex selection was promoted by groups in the West. Ironically some who were anti-abortion in America saw abortion for sex selection as a great idea in Asia. In this part of the book neither "pro-choice" nor "pro-life/anti-abortion" groups come out innocent.
The book does leave me with questions. Hvistendahl comes across with very strong morals, believing sex selective abortions are absolutely wrong. At the same time, she is clearly an advocate for a woman's right to choose whether to abort or not. I have trouble understanding how a person can be okay with abortion...except for when the abortion is sought for certain reasons. This is Hvistendahl's position, but the reasons and arguments for this position are lacking. What's the difference? What makes one woman aborting a baby because she does not want a baby okay but another woman aborting a baby because she does not want a girl wrong?
I think Ross Douthat gets to the point of what I am trying to say: http://douthat.blogs.nytimes.com/2011...
Overall though, this is an important and eye-opening book.
She documents how as technologies such as ultrasound made their way into places like China, South Korea, and India people were able to choose to abort a baby if they did not want the gender. To put it more bluntly, mostly they wanted boys so if it was a girl they aborted it (actually, if it was the first pregnancy they would keep a girl, but the chances of having a girl on subsequent pregnancy went way down). This has led to a huge absence of women which is resulting in, and will do so more in the future, in things like buying brides from poorer areas and increased human trafficking for forced prostitution.
Throughout the book she talks about how sex selection was promoted by groups in the West. Ironically some who were anti-abortion in America saw abortion for sex selection as a great idea in Asia. In this part of the book neither "pro-choice" nor "pro-life/anti-abortion" groups come out innocent.
The book does leave me with questions. Hvistendahl comes across with very strong morals, believing sex selective abortions are absolutely wrong. At the same time, she is clearly an advocate for a woman's right to choose whether to abort or not. I have trouble understanding how a person can be okay with abortion...except for when the abortion is sought for certain reasons. This is Hvistendahl's position, but the reasons and arguments for this position are lacking. What's the difference? What makes one woman aborting a baby because she does not want a baby okay but another woman aborting a baby because she does not want a girl wrong?
I think Ross Douthat gets to the point of what I am trying to say: http://douthat.blogs.nytimes.com/2011...
Overall though, this is an important and eye-opening book.
November 8, 2011
What I wanted from this book was a historical, scientific, and sociological examination of global practices of sex selection. Hvistendahl could've delivered that based on the merits of her exhaustive research alone. But her argument is weakened by a pervasively moralizing tone directed against technology, availability of abortion and family planning services. She refers constantly to "missing girls"...one gets the sense that she means to engender sympathy simply for the aborted female fetuses, but not for the status of women as a whole in the societies most frequently selecting for sex. Fine, if that's her argument, but she introduces the book as if it'll be something else. Furthermore, almost none of her indignation is aimed at the cultural and religious practices that have devalued women for centuries. Technology, development, and reproductive health initiatives have made it safely to many countries without sex selective abortion threatening to wipe out women. I think she is right to give attention to this very serious issue, but I so wish her approach had been different.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
July 3, 2011
This is a thoroughly researched, well-written expose on the current preponderance of males in some Asian and Eastern European countries. The author ties this current trend to the hysteria in the West in the late 1960s and 1970s over overpopulation, and to the ways in which international organizations, funded by the West, interfered in the fertility of Asian countries, leading to some of this imbalance. The book is so well-laid out, it felt as though I were following a criminal case, with each bit of evidence leading to the resulting conclusions. She explores the problem from many angles, and shows diverse results, none of them positive. The real kicker is in her epilogue, when we see sex selection at work right now in the good old USA, only in our case, the selection is in favor of girls. And it doesn't end there; selection for more than sex is in the works. There are serious ethical questions here. Very thought-provoking and highly recommended!
March 13, 2013
I was very excited to read this book, but very disappointed. The topic is very important, but the research is shoddy, to say the least. Full of unsupported assertions. Things like labeling concerns about overpopulation "overpopulation hysteria." Whose to say that those concerns were not (and are not) well-founded, just because the author say its hysterical? Attempts to turn a challenging social situation into a big Western conspiracy really do not hold water. And much of what she hypes into her big revelation just doesn't hold up in the end. She starts with the puzzle that, in her view, China has great gender equity, so it the gender imbalance is puzzling. She sets the book up that she has uncovered the hidden truth behind the puzzle, but it never pans out.
I think the author does a disservice to an important topic by being so sloppy in her argument.
I think the author does a disservice to an important topic by being so sloppy in her argument.
October 15, 2011
Mara Hvistenfahl makes the claim, resting on cultural history and western technology, that there are millions of women missing from the world because of abortion and sex selection.
I'm not convinced that selective abortion is the culprit here. Although the author points out ultrasounds are cheap, abortions are not. One could afford a cheap ultrasound, but a cheap abortion often kills. That aspect isn't addressed.
The book goes on to connect historical cultural trends, population control efforts, and western technology as the main reason for the lack of girls. She also tends to confuse population control and planned parenthood with abortion and that is an inherently false claim. Planned parenthood methods help get people out of poverty but not through sex selective abortions.
It seems to go for the impact, but her conclusions are suspect and there are no solutions to these issues.
She does a good job in explaining how women are treated and the dangers of a world with a majority or men. Going into detail about those consequences was important for me. The book also deals with the issues of prostitution, mail-order brides, and similar topics that display how women are treated and how that treatment worsens with more men than women.
In my opinion, women haven't been disappearing because of sex selective abortions, but the sad fact they are the victims of crime and abuse their entire lives. That seems to be the main issue that calls for correction. Focusing too much on sex selective abortion skips over the bigger issues women face.
I'm not convinced that selective abortion is the culprit here. Although the author points out ultrasounds are cheap, abortions are not. One could afford a cheap ultrasound, but a cheap abortion often kills. That aspect isn't addressed.
The book goes on to connect historical cultural trends, population control efforts, and western technology as the main reason for the lack of girls. She also tends to confuse population control and planned parenthood with abortion and that is an inherently false claim. Planned parenthood methods help get people out of poverty but not through sex selective abortions.
It seems to go for the impact, but her conclusions are suspect and there are no solutions to these issues.
She does a good job in explaining how women are treated and the dangers of a world with a majority or men. Going into detail about those consequences was important for me. The book also deals with the issues of prostitution, mail-order brides, and similar topics that display how women are treated and how that treatment worsens with more men than women.
In my opinion, women haven't been disappearing because of sex selective abortions, but the sad fact they are the victims of crime and abuse their entire lives. That seems to be the main issue that calls for correction. Focusing too much on sex selective abortion skips over the bigger issues women face.
July 5, 2011
This book very neatly summarizes a problem that most people are completely unaware even exists. Namely, that sex-selective abortion in Asia has taken enough girls out of the population to skew the global sex ration at birth from its usual 105 boys to 100 girls to nearer 107::100.
Hvistendahl handles the subject in a way that is carefully not hysterical, tracing each step along the path that has taken regions of China and India to the kind of sex at birth ratios that have now become a global imbalance. I also think it is fair to say that she gives credit where credit is due - China's one child policy starts looking a little mild compared to some of the population control efforts inspired by rich American organizations. Not to say that this book is a dry history, summing up the status of things - The statistics are annotated with stories to provide an emotional gut punch to get the message through. Although direct predictions of the future of these countries are avoided, (Besides the obvious: too many men) Hvistendahl provides enough information about historically male heavy heavy societies that it is difficult to not make some dire predictions on her behalf.
In a way, this book felt to me like a book about ethics, and where your freedom to make choices about your family intersects the freedoms of the children in that family, and society at large. Definitly a thought provoking read!
Hvistendahl handles the subject in a way that is carefully not hysterical, tracing each step along the path that has taken regions of China and India to the kind of sex at birth ratios that have now become a global imbalance. I also think it is fair to say that she gives credit where credit is due - China's one child policy starts looking a little mild compared to some of the population control efforts inspired by rich American organizations. Not to say that this book is a dry history, summing up the status of things - The statistics are annotated with stories to provide an emotional gut punch to get the message through. Although direct predictions of the future of these countries are avoided, (Besides the obvious: too many men) Hvistendahl provides enough information about historically male heavy heavy societies that it is difficult to not make some dire predictions on her behalf.
In a way, this book felt to me like a book about ethics, and where your freedom to make choices about your family intersects the freedoms of the children in that family, and society at large. Definitly a thought provoking read!
February 4, 2017
This is such a bad book that engages in fear mongering, bases all the fear on anecdotal evidence, has poor statistical correlation ("there are prostitutes around. if there are less women, they will probably be all forced into prostitution" "there are a lot of horny men around. this is probably because of sex selection and not because this has been the state of things since time immemorial" "sometimes, states force people to have abortions. this awful thing is also caused by sex selection"), uses dubious facts (e.g., incorrectly sourcing statistics on health aid on one quote from a private employee in a newspaper, racistly saying that Asian Americans abort children because the third child is more likely to be male ignoring the fact that maybe people with balanced families don't try for a third child), and generally subjects all the reporting to her own biases and preconceptions, cherry-picking her facts and situations, and asserting things as fact that are unprovable opinions. You know we live in a modern world where children are wanted and modern societies are free and pro-choice so the way this book/opinion piece shames people who are making free choices about their personal lives, and spreads fear without basis about the "unnatural"-ness of the decision, when it's probably not even the bottom 20% of the least unnatural thing human beings are currently doing on this planet. Just feels utterly backward.
July 12, 2013
Unnatural Selection was eye-opening and completely heart breaking. It is true that there are a lot of issues in this world that people don't really want to face, especially when the topic is a global concern. But I think reading a book like this can help fight that despicable stigma that I sometimes see in my own home, community, and high school.
What this book is about...is a consequence of years of gender discrimination. In a world ruled by men, populated overwhelmingly by men alone, women would only find themselves in worse situations. Why is it so hard for people, for society in general, to view women as totally equal to men? Even in the 21st century, problems are so apparent. And now, the globe may be feeling the affects of the horrible sex-selective abortion rampage that took Asia by storm only a couple decades ago.
And of course, Western civilization has perhaps the largest role in all of this. Images of forced sterilizations, campaigns for abortions, for female abortions alone, can never be erased from my mind now. This was a really informative book, but it was also painful to read. I hope many more people read this book and realize the problem of the way society has valued and treated women.
What this book is about...is a consequence of years of gender discrimination. In a world ruled by men, populated overwhelmingly by men alone, women would only find themselves in worse situations. Why is it so hard for people, for society in general, to view women as totally equal to men? Even in the 21st century, problems are so apparent. And now, the globe may be feeling the affects of the horrible sex-selective abortion rampage that took Asia by storm only a couple decades ago.
And of course, Western civilization has perhaps the largest role in all of this. Images of forced sterilizations, campaigns for abortions, for female abortions alone, can never be erased from my mind now. This was a really informative book, but it was also painful to read. I hope many more people read this book and realize the problem of the way society has valued and treated women.
December 6, 2015
This was an excellent and very eye-opening book. I was aware of the gender imbalance in China, but I had no idea how extensive it is throughout the world – in India, Eastern Europe, and other places. Over 160 million women are now missing in Asia alone (greater than the whole female population of United States), and the instability that this is going to cause (and is already causing) is extreme. Perhaps the most disturbing part of this book, besides reading about women being forced to abort and baby girls aborted in the 3rd trimester, was the realization that ultimately it was the West, including America, behind the push for sex selection abortions in Asia. I didn't know that we were responsible for a lot of it. Very disturbing – and informative. The beginning of the book discusses the problem, then it goes into the reasons why – how overpopulation became a common fear among the Western elite, how sex selection a population control pushed on the developing world, and then it goes into the consequences of a world full of men. It talks about trafficking and kidnapping and bride selling. Very disturbing stuff – and it's not going to get better anytime soon. Everyone should read this book.
July 8, 2011
I'll giver it to Mara Hvistendahl, this is a well researched book. It is thoroughly interesting. It is well written. The problem of sex selection, while not nearly fleshed out to the extent I would have liked her to, is a valid concern. However Hvistendahl doesn't make a case for it being the "West's" fault that other countries abort their girls. Just because we give them the tools doesn't mean we get the blame. Medical companies and governments wish to promote population control, an endeavor that Hvistendahl never gives me reason to dislike. She never proves that the west promotes aborting girls. She only proves that many countries are sexiest and while she presents a case for stopping the proliferation of life saving ultrasounds she never gets past the need for cultural change.
October 1, 2012
Recommended. Has won the following awards: Finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, Finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, A Wall Street Journal Best Book of 2011, A Slate Best Book of 2011,
A Discover Magazine Best Book of 2011. Author is a science writer and some bits were too data-driven to hold my interest, which is why I chose to skim over those parts just to get the main ideas. Not really any new information I was not aware of, but just nice to see it in one place, well-documented, well-researched, and so well-received in secular, scientific, and non-politicized circles.
A Discover Magazine Best Book of 2011. Author is a science writer and some bits were too data-driven to hold my interest, which is why I chose to skim over those parts just to get the main ideas. Not really any new information I was not aware of, but just nice to see it in one place, well-documented, well-researched, and so well-received in secular, scientific, and non-politicized circles.
April 10, 2017
This book offers a wealth of information on the over-population and demographics debate since the 1950's. Hvistendahl tears apart the notion that sex-selected abortions in Asia are simply an ugly cultural phenomenon, and gives objective, evidence based arguments to the contrary. The truth is that the West has had a lot to do with one-child policy enforcement, sex-selected abortions and the resulting gender imbalance found in some Asian countries today.
Unnatural selection will stay on my book shelf as an important reference book for demographics, and a darn interesting read.
Unnatural selection will stay on my book shelf as an important reference book for demographics, and a darn interesting read.
January 21, 2013
I don't remember exactly what bugged me about this book (since I read it several months ago), but what I do remember is (a) author had some sort of hobby-horse (abortion, I think?) and (b) I found myself reading the book about the history of Superman instead. And I'm not really into Superman.
September 26, 2019
Enlightening book on a subject that does not receive much attention. This book goes beyond political views of choice to expose the truly horrific global epidemic of sex selective abortion.
November 26, 2016
This was super depressing and everyone should read it and then maybe we can figure out how to fix it.
I was totally right about this in college debate.
I was totally right about this in college debate.
July 17, 2014
Kindle quotes:
Back then women were so proud to own refrigerators that they crocheted dust covers for them and placed the appliances in the living room. (Then too most Chinese apartments had kitchens so small that refrigerators did not fit anywhere else.) - location 43
The ancient Greeks believed that when it came to procreation men’s testicles had specific roles: the left testicle produced girls, while the right one yielded boys. Aristotle took this to its logical but painful conclusion, teaching that men should tie off their left testicle during intercourse if they wanted a son. - location 104
I began reporting on the sex ratio imbalance by making a series of trips to a particularly skewed quarter of China, a corner of Jiangsu province where the ratio of boys to girls born had reached 3 to 2. - location 126
combination of ultrasound and abortion, in other words, has claimed over 160 million potential women and girls—in Asia alone. - location 215
If 160 million women were missing from the U.S. population, you would notice—160 million is more than the entire female population of the United States. - location 224
In 2005 University of Chicago economist Emily Oster wrote a paper claiming that the high rate of hepatitis B among Asians, which increases the probability a woman will give birth to a boy, was responsible for nearly half of Amartya Sen’s 100 million missing women.20 (Among other problems, Oster’s analysis did not account for the fact that in countries with imbalances the sex ratio at birth jumps significantly for children born second or later, a phenomenon that can’t be explained by disease. She later retracted her findings.) - location 273
Sexism might be an obvious culprit for imbalance if it weren’t so universal. Parents in nearly all cultures say they prefer boys, and yet sex selection only strikes in part of the world.d As Guilmoto continued to research the issue, however, he found some common threads that unite countries with gender imbalances. First, the countries where sex selection occurs are developing rapidly, and their health care systems have matured to the point where prenatal screening is widely available. Second, abortion is pervasive. China, Vietnam, and South Korea all have exceptionally high abortion rates, and a reliance on pregnancy termination as a contraception method is also common to the Caucasus countries, as former Soviet republics. The final commonality derived from his early work in India. Most affected countries have recently experienced a drop in fertility. Over the past fifty years Asia has seen the most rapid decline in population growth of any continent in the history of the world. In the late 1960s, the average Asian woman had 5.7 children. In 2006 she had 2.3.24 When it comes to sex selection, a drop in the total fertility rate to two children is something of a turning point. If parents have more than two children, they have a good chance of having a son by sheer chance, without technological intervention. If they have only two children, though, 24 percent will conceive only daughters—and 24 percent screening for sex and aborting is enough to seriously skew a country’s sex ratio.25 And yet in parts of East Asia parents rarely have even two children. In South Korea, Japan, Taiwan, Singapore, Hong Kong, and Macau, which together boast the lowest fertility rates in the world, parents are far more likely to have one. Moving beyond the Asian tigers, the list of low fertility countries reads like a rundown of hot spots for missing girls. The average Vietnamese woman has only 1.9 children. Her Chinese counterpart has 1.5. Georgians are at 1.4 children per couple, just behind Switzerland. Armenians rank even further down the list, with just over 1.3, a total fertility rate close to that of Italy. Azerbaijanis have fewer children than Americans do.26 Examining geographical variations within countries with imbalances yielded still more insights. By breaking down sex ratio at birth by city and region and then comparing those figures against education and income levels, Guilmoto found sex selection typically starts with the urban, well educated stratum of society. Elites are the first to gain access to a new technology, whether MRI scanners, smart phones—or ultrasound machines. In South Korea the first parents to selectively abort were urbanites in Seoul. In Azerbaijan they were residents of Baku, the capital.27 According to India’s 2001 census, women with high school diplomas and above who gave birth over the previous year had 114 boys for every 100 girls. Among illiterate women, by contrast, the sex ratio for recent births was just over 108—still skewed, but much closer to normal.28 This holds true for fathers’ education too: Indian households in which the head—and in India the father is almost always the head—has at least a high school diploma are 25 percent more likely to have a boy than those where the head has minimal schooling.29 - location 293
Most parents wait, as the Wu cousins did, until they already have one or two daughters before resorting to sex selective abortion; very few abort because of the fetus’s sex during the first pregnancy. We know this because around the world the sex ratio at birth jumps abruptly with birth order. In 1989, at the height of South Korea’s sex selection binge, the country’s sex ratio for first births was 104—just about normal. For second births it was 113, for third births it was 185, and for fourth births it was 209—putting the odds of a couple having a boy over a girl at over two to one. - location 515
By showing that Asian immigrants continue to select for boys in a new environment, even as they earn more money and become U.S. citizens, Edlund and her husband have come up with compelling evidence that what Christophe Guilmoto dubbed “local stories” simply don’t work. So what explains America’s pockets of sex selection? Considering how close to home this latest rash of gender imbalance is, it is poorly understood. We do have a few clues, though. The fertility rate among Asian Americans is among the lowest of any minority group in the United States, at 1.9 children per women.52 According to the magazine Hyphen, meanwhile, 35 percent of Asian American pregnancies end in abortion, almost twice the abortion rate among whites.53 These conditions remain essentially the same as in Asia. - location 875
“Almost a third of Indian gynecologists’ income comes from abortion,” he tells me. - location 1076
By 1977 doctors in Seoul were performing 2.75 abortions for every birth—the highest documented rate of abortion in human history.55 - location 2357
In the United States, the average woman seeking an abortion is in her first pregnancy. Usually she is unmarried. Very often she is young and getting rid of what is sometimes called a mistake. In Eastern Europe and Asia, the typical woman going in for an abortion is married and has children. Odds are she has already had two or three abortions. (The average Azerbaijani woman has 3.2 abortions over the course of her lifetime. Her Georgian counterpart has 3.7.) - location 2596
In 2003, one-third of all marriages in Taiwan were between a local and a foreign spouse, the vast majority of them between local men and foreign women.6 In South Korea over a thousand international marriage agencies have registered with the government.7 Marriages to foreigners accounted for nearly 11 percent of all 2008 weddings in that country.8 The rate was even higher in rural areas, where 40 percent of Korean farmers and fishermen who married that year wed foreigners.9 - location 2815
in 2005 Korea bottomed out with the lowest total fertility rate in the world, at an average of 1.08 children per woman. (The birth rate has since climbed, just barely, to 1.22.) - location 4003
But fertility doctors who perform preimplantation sex selection also defend it on another ground, and that reason explains why at Fertility Institutes everything is pink. The wall on which the clinic’s name is mounted, in a soft cursive script, is magenta. The mat in the framed collage of baby photos hanging on the wall is coral. The laboratory workers examining biopsied embryos under the microscope wear fuschia scrubs. For the most part Americans, like Asians and Eastern Europeans, have a particular preference in babies. And when doctors justify sex selection they point to that preference: what happens in America is different because it is not driven by patriarchy—in America, we want girls. - location 4263
For the most part parents going through PGD or sperm sorting dread having a boy. Girls are the goal for 80 percent of HRC Fertility’s patients and 75 percent of the sperm sorting patients Genetics and IVF Institute takes on. - location 4345
Back then women were so proud to own refrigerators that they crocheted dust covers for them and placed the appliances in the living room. (Then too most Chinese apartments had kitchens so small that refrigerators did not fit anywhere else.) - location 43
The ancient Greeks believed that when it came to procreation men’s testicles had specific roles: the left testicle produced girls, while the right one yielded boys. Aristotle took this to its logical but painful conclusion, teaching that men should tie off their left testicle during intercourse if they wanted a son. - location 104
I began reporting on the sex ratio imbalance by making a series of trips to a particularly skewed quarter of China, a corner of Jiangsu province where the ratio of boys to girls born had reached 3 to 2. - location 126
combination of ultrasound and abortion, in other words, has claimed over 160 million potential women and girls—in Asia alone. - location 215
If 160 million women were missing from the U.S. population, you would notice—160 million is more than the entire female population of the United States. - location 224
In 2005 University of Chicago economist Emily Oster wrote a paper claiming that the high rate of hepatitis B among Asians, which increases the probability a woman will give birth to a boy, was responsible for nearly half of Amartya Sen’s 100 million missing women.20 (Among other problems, Oster’s analysis did not account for the fact that in countries with imbalances the sex ratio at birth jumps significantly for children born second or later, a phenomenon that can’t be explained by disease. She later retracted her findings.) - location 273
Sexism might be an obvious culprit for imbalance if it weren’t so universal. Parents in nearly all cultures say they prefer boys, and yet sex selection only strikes in part of the world.d As Guilmoto continued to research the issue, however, he found some common threads that unite countries with gender imbalances. First, the countries where sex selection occurs are developing rapidly, and their health care systems have matured to the point where prenatal screening is widely available. Second, abortion is pervasive. China, Vietnam, and South Korea all have exceptionally high abortion rates, and a reliance on pregnancy termination as a contraception method is also common to the Caucasus countries, as former Soviet republics. The final commonality derived from his early work in India. Most affected countries have recently experienced a drop in fertility. Over the past fifty years Asia has seen the most rapid decline in population growth of any continent in the history of the world. In the late 1960s, the average Asian woman had 5.7 children. In 2006 she had 2.3.24 When it comes to sex selection, a drop in the total fertility rate to two children is something of a turning point. If parents have more than two children, they have a good chance of having a son by sheer chance, without technological intervention. If they have only two children, though, 24 percent will conceive only daughters—and 24 percent screening for sex and aborting is enough to seriously skew a country’s sex ratio.25 And yet in parts of East Asia parents rarely have even two children. In South Korea, Japan, Taiwan, Singapore, Hong Kong, and Macau, which together boast the lowest fertility rates in the world, parents are far more likely to have one. Moving beyond the Asian tigers, the list of low fertility countries reads like a rundown of hot spots for missing girls. The average Vietnamese woman has only 1.9 children. Her Chinese counterpart has 1.5. Georgians are at 1.4 children per couple, just behind Switzerland. Armenians rank even further down the list, with just over 1.3, a total fertility rate close to that of Italy. Azerbaijanis have fewer children than Americans do.26 Examining geographical variations within countries with imbalances yielded still more insights. By breaking down sex ratio at birth by city and region and then comparing those figures against education and income levels, Guilmoto found sex selection typically starts with the urban, well educated stratum of society. Elites are the first to gain access to a new technology, whether MRI scanners, smart phones—or ultrasound machines. In South Korea the first parents to selectively abort were urbanites in Seoul. In Azerbaijan they were residents of Baku, the capital.27 According to India’s 2001 census, women with high school diplomas and above who gave birth over the previous year had 114 boys for every 100 girls. Among illiterate women, by contrast, the sex ratio for recent births was just over 108—still skewed, but much closer to normal.28 This holds true for fathers’ education too: Indian households in which the head—and in India the father is almost always the head—has at least a high school diploma are 25 percent more likely to have a boy than those where the head has minimal schooling.29 - location 293
Most parents wait, as the Wu cousins did, until they already have one or two daughters before resorting to sex selective abortion; very few abort because of the fetus’s sex during the first pregnancy. We know this because around the world the sex ratio at birth jumps abruptly with birth order. In 1989, at the height of South Korea’s sex selection binge, the country’s sex ratio for first births was 104—just about normal. For second births it was 113, for third births it was 185, and for fourth births it was 209—putting the odds of a couple having a boy over a girl at over two to one. - location 515
By showing that Asian immigrants continue to select for boys in a new environment, even as they earn more money and become U.S. citizens, Edlund and her husband have come up with compelling evidence that what Christophe Guilmoto dubbed “local stories” simply don’t work. So what explains America’s pockets of sex selection? Considering how close to home this latest rash of gender imbalance is, it is poorly understood. We do have a few clues, though. The fertility rate among Asian Americans is among the lowest of any minority group in the United States, at 1.9 children per women.52 According to the magazine Hyphen, meanwhile, 35 percent of Asian American pregnancies end in abortion, almost twice the abortion rate among whites.53 These conditions remain essentially the same as in Asia. - location 875
“Almost a third of Indian gynecologists’ income comes from abortion,” he tells me. - location 1076
By 1977 doctors in Seoul were performing 2.75 abortions for every birth—the highest documented rate of abortion in human history.55 - location 2357
In the United States, the average woman seeking an abortion is in her first pregnancy. Usually she is unmarried. Very often she is young and getting rid of what is sometimes called a mistake. In Eastern Europe and Asia, the typical woman going in for an abortion is married and has children. Odds are she has already had two or three abortions. (The average Azerbaijani woman has 3.2 abortions over the course of her lifetime. Her Georgian counterpart has 3.7.) - location 2596
In 2003, one-third of all marriages in Taiwan were between a local and a foreign spouse, the vast majority of them between local men and foreign women.6 In South Korea over a thousand international marriage agencies have registered with the government.7 Marriages to foreigners accounted for nearly 11 percent of all 2008 weddings in that country.8 The rate was even higher in rural areas, where 40 percent of Korean farmers and fishermen who married that year wed foreigners.9 - location 2815
in 2005 Korea bottomed out with the lowest total fertility rate in the world, at an average of 1.08 children per woman. (The birth rate has since climbed, just barely, to 1.22.) - location 4003
But fertility doctors who perform preimplantation sex selection also defend it on another ground, and that reason explains why at Fertility Institutes everything is pink. The wall on which the clinic’s name is mounted, in a soft cursive script, is magenta. The mat in the framed collage of baby photos hanging on the wall is coral. The laboratory workers examining biopsied embryos under the microscope wear fuschia scrubs. For the most part Americans, like Asians and Eastern Europeans, have a particular preference in babies. And when doctors justify sex selection they point to that preference: what happens in America is different because it is not driven by patriarchy—in America, we want girls. - location 4263
For the most part parents going through PGD or sperm sorting dread having a boy. Girls are the goal for 80 percent of HRC Fertility’s patients and 75 percent of the sperm sorting patients Genetics and IVF Institute takes on. - location 4345
October 16, 2016
Wow. My eyes were opened to a problem that I hadn't even known existed. But not only does this book describe the gender imbalance in the world today, but it also explains the causes throughout the past few decades in several countries and expounds upon current and potential effects. I had a lot to think about and a lot to learn. For example, I would have never known that the U.S. government (conservatives, no less) funded forced abortions and sterilizations in Asian countries because we were so concerned about the world population growth. These are the facts that tend to get swept under the rug of history but that have a huge impact decades later.
This book offers lots of facts and figures and appears very well researched. I appreciated that the author took the time to travel the countries she writes about and interview citizens in the quest for the full story. However, at times this book seemed alarmist and possibly even contradictory. But what bothered me the most was how the author sometimes portrayed the people she interviewed. One scientist was portrayed as old and extremely forgetful. Another interviewee was depicted as drunk and cynical. While this might have been what struck the author most during the interview, it just as well might be sensationalist measures or just a lack of respect for these persons, which I find deplorable. In other cases, the actions of these interviewees are framed in such a way as to lead the reader to a certain conclusion, despite the fact that this conclusion can't be verified and could very well be misleading. That was my big problem with this book.
Overall, however, the information in this book is valuable and I would recommend it to others--though which of my friends would be interested in a book about gender imbalance is beyond me! My one recommendation, which I would apply to all exposé books of this type anyway, is to be sure to take it with a grain of salt. As always, take time to consider and come to your own conclusions, rather than taking the information presented only at face value.
Three stars. Not because it wasn't a good book or a valuable read, but because compared to the other books on my shelves, it's not one I would take the time to read again. I would still recommend it to anyone considering reading it.
This book offers lots of facts and figures and appears very well researched. I appreciated that the author took the time to travel the countries she writes about and interview citizens in the quest for the full story. However, at times this book seemed alarmist and possibly even contradictory. But what bothered me the most was how the author sometimes portrayed the people she interviewed. One scientist was portrayed as old and extremely forgetful. Another interviewee was depicted as drunk and cynical. While this might have been what struck the author most during the interview, it just as well might be sensationalist measures or just a lack of respect for these persons, which I find deplorable. In other cases, the actions of these interviewees are framed in such a way as to lead the reader to a certain conclusion, despite the fact that this conclusion can't be verified and could very well be misleading. That was my big problem with this book.
Overall, however, the information in this book is valuable and I would recommend it to others--though which of my friends would be interested in a book about gender imbalance is beyond me! My one recommendation, which I would apply to all exposé books of this type anyway, is to be sure to take it with a grain of salt. As always, take time to consider and come to your own conclusions, rather than taking the information presented only at face value.
Three stars. Not because it wasn't a good book or a valuable read, but because compared to the other books on my shelves, it's not one I would take the time to read again. I would still recommend it to anyone considering reading it.
December 22, 2017
This book was quite interesting to read, but I just didn't agree with many of Hvistendahl's conclusions. There's too much for me to include here, so I'll just touch on two:
The author's stance on abortion is strange: she believes sex-selective abortion is wrong (because that would be discrimination against the possibility of one sex - namely, the female sex), but she doesn't have a problem with abortion itself. If one doesn't believe a fetus is a baby with a right to life, then this discrimination argument just doesn't hold up. She mentions over and over that this is what pro-choice activists are having a hard time with in their fight against sex-selective abortion - they don't want to "humanize" the unborn.
Also, she seems to hold a very negative view of Christians and the belief in a Creator of the world. On p. 102, she talks about the "West's predominant creation myth" and on p. xiv, she mentions that a natural balance of the sex's populations was deemed by Johann Peter Sussmilch, a German statistician, to be the work of a Creator, but when Charles Darwin looked into the matter, he "intuited" that it "connected somehow to evolution." And apparently Darwin's gut feeling is enough for her on that matter. She didn't need to get into the Creation debate at all, yet she does... and proves nothing.
The author's stance on abortion is strange: she believes sex-selective abortion is wrong (because that would be discrimination against the possibility of one sex - namely, the female sex), but she doesn't have a problem with abortion itself. If one doesn't believe a fetus is a baby with a right to life, then this discrimination argument just doesn't hold up. She mentions over and over that this is what pro-choice activists are having a hard time with in their fight against sex-selective abortion - they don't want to "humanize" the unborn.
Also, she seems to hold a very negative view of Christians and the belief in a Creator of the world. On p. 102, she talks about the "West's predominant creation myth" and on p. xiv, she mentions that a natural balance of the sex's populations was deemed by Johann Peter Sussmilch, a German statistician, to be the work of a Creator, but when Charles Darwin looked into the matter, he "intuited" that it "connected somehow to evolution." And apparently Darwin's gut feeling is enough for her on that matter. She didn't need to get into the Creation debate at all, yet she does... and proves nothing.
November 27, 2020
I would guess that most Americans have heard of China’s One Child policy, and many will remember that Chinese parents appeared to have a preference for boys (hence the large numbers of girls in orphanages, and girl children available for international adoptions). I thought this book would be largely about that, and was greatly surprised to find out that the trend is *vastly* larger than China, stretching throughout Asia, South Asia, and into Eastern Europe.
The first half of the book documents the “what” of the trend toward skewed boy/girl birth ratios. I thought it was a bit on the dry side, but still interesting in documenting the various regions of the world where the ratio changed, when, how, the social pressures that created the why and/or attempted to explain it, and when and how countries tried to fix it. The second half of the book was more interesting to me as the author explored the social implications of majority-male societies on men, women, and society as a whole. Overall, very interesting and pretty frightening about what the deeply skewed ratio will do to this planet.
The first half of the book documents the “what” of the trend toward skewed boy/girl birth ratios. I thought it was a bit on the dry side, but still interesting in documenting the various regions of the world where the ratio changed, when, how, the social pressures that created the why and/or attempted to explain it, and when and how countries tried to fix it. The second half of the book was more interesting to me as the author explored the social implications of majority-male societies on men, women, and society as a whole. Overall, very interesting and pretty frightening about what the deeply skewed ratio will do to this planet.
Displaying 1 - 30 of 223 reviews