UNINTENDED CONSEQUENCES :

Desire for Sons Drives Use of Prenatal Scans in China (ERIK ECKHOLM, June 21, 2002, NY Times)

In greater numbers than ever, China's villagers are using inexpensive prenatal scans and then abortion to prevent the birth of unwanted daughters and to ensure that they will bear a son, recent studies and census data show.

Through the last decade, a time of rapid economic growth, the gap between male and female births only widened, giving China the largest gender disparity among newborns of any country in the world. In pockets of the countryside the imbalance is staggering, with births of as many as 144 boys recorded for every 100 girls. [...]

Demographers predict serious practical effects for Chinese society as a result of the growing imbalance. The abduction of women in remote areas, for sale to villagers desperate for a wife, is already a chronic problem and could intensify.

Social scientists also speculate about the disruptive effects another decade or two from now, when there will be tens of millions of excess men in a country with a population of more than 1.3 billion, unable to marry and likely to be concentrated on the bottom rungs of society.

At least the Times has finally noticed the dangers of abortion as a gender selection tool and its disproportionate impact on females, but one wonders whether it's mere naivetŽ or a more insidious political agenda that causes them to treat the issue as a phenomenon that's exclusive to China. Declining female birth rates are a global problem, one that's likely to accelerate as the developing world reduces its birthrates generally. Even today, in America, there is nothing to stop a couple from deciding to terminate for no other reason than that the child would be female. Such are the perverse consequences of women's rights. Freedom of choice may be their battle, but the ugly, nearly unmentionable truth of the matter is that abortion is causing an absolute decline in the ratio of women to men in the world, a decline that must eventually play out in the political sphere with consequences that are unlikely to favor the freedom of women. This is just one of the reasons that twenty years from now positions on abortion will have reversed themselves, with women generally opposed and men in favor. Posted by Orrin Judd at June 21, 2002 11:06 AM