December 2, 2002
SEVEN BRIDES FOR EIGHT BROTHERS:
The Desperate Bachelors: India's Growing Population Imbalance Means Brides Are Becoming Scarce (John Lancaster, December 2, 2002, Washington Post)Four years ago, as is the custom here, Jai Palarwal and his wife set out to find a bride for their eldest son. They buttonholed friends and relatives, and after two years finally secured a meeting with the parents of a teenage girl from another village. But the marriage was not to be. The parents thought their daughter could do better.Since then, there hasn't even been a nibble.
"The ones who are looking want a groom with a government job and large tracts of land, and we have neither," said Palarwal, a retired electrician, as he lounged on a rope cot outside his modest four-room home. "The girls' parents have become very choosy."
They can afford to be. The parents in question live in the state of Haryana, and Haryana is running out of girls.
A fertile farming state just west of New Delhi, Haryana produces a smaller share of girls, relative to overall births, than almost anywhere else in India. The 2001 census found just 820 girls for every 1,000 boys among children under age 6, down from 879 in 1991. The lopsided sex ratio reflects the spread of modern medical technology, particularly ultrasound exams, which allow Indian couples to indulge a cultural preference for sons by using abortion to avoid having girls. [...]
While Haryana is an extreme case, the trend is also visible at the national level, where the number of girls under 6 declined from 945 for every 1,000 boys in 1991 to 927 in 2001. Some of the sharpest declines have occurred in the most prosperous areas of the country -- including wealthy neighborhoods in New Delhi -- where couples have the wherewithal to practice sex-selective abortion and the pressure from their parents to produce sons is often acute.
But only now are some people realizing what the shortage might mean for the sons.
At least folks seem to be waking up to these kind of demographic issues, though for obvious reasons they seem to find it easier to see them as problems in the Third World than in the West. One thing conspicuously missing from even stories like this one though is the changes that will likely occur in politics and social policy as a result of male voters outnumbering female voters in democracies for the first time since female enfranchisement. Posted by Orrin Judd at December 2, 2002 12:13 PM
China has a comparable problem and it's not a democracy. That's the one that worries me.
India can to some extent export its problem to Britain, U.S., and a few other places in the world.
Well, I'd say our sympathy for "exported problems" is on a downswing.
Posted by: Andrew X at December 2, 2002 11:38 AMAndrew - I think Fred meant that young Indian males can emigrate to the U.S. and find a wife here -- but in reality that's not so easy.
Posted by: pj at December 2, 2002 12:35 PMFred:
China may be a good illustration as it shifts from Communism (feminine) to Fascism (masculine).
Fred is on the money. The social upheaval in China's next generation caused by mass abortions of girl babies is going to be enormous, and needless to say, unprecedented.
Posted by: Will Collier at December 2, 2002 3:09 PMBy the way, we all assume, as OJ notes, that this is a third-world problem. But its just not possible that no one in the US has ever used abortion to choose a baby's (especially a second child's) sex. Has anyone ever seen any numbers on this? Is there any quintile in the US population with a strangely lopsided male-female live birth ratio? What exactly would the Democrats do if poor blacks started to select for male births? Would their collective heads explode?
Posted by: David Cohen at December 2, 2002 3:19 PMMaybe it's not all bad. Maybe the Hindus will
stop burning brides alive sometime.
There was a scandal about eight-nine years back regarding Indian (Asian) immigrant families to Western Canada (B.C.) having female fetuses aborted. But if I recall correctly, the doctor purportedly doing the deed lived in Washington state.
Posted by: Barry Meislin at December 2, 2002 4:46 PMThe only stories I've seen on it in the U.S. suggest that it is a problem among immigrants here, but not among the native population. It seems that because women are treated equally here there's less emphasis placed on male birth.
Posted by: oj at December 2, 2002 7:15 PMI have personal knowledge of American women being forced to have abortions when they did not want to, but as far as I know, sex of the baby was not the issue.
Posted by: Harry at December 2, 2002 10:53 PMIronic, isn't it, how the Father of Lies has sold some people on a woman's right to choose non-existence.
Posted by: Lou Gots at December 3, 2002 6:19 PM