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-INTERVIEW: 160 million missing girls: ‘Sex selection’ is creating a new endangered species: women. A journalist investigates the countries with too many men.: Mara Hvistendahl, author of 'Unnatural Selection: Choosing Boys Over Girls, and the Consequences of a World Full of Men' (J. Gabriel Boylan, June 5, 2011, Boston Globe)

Over the past few decades, 160 million women have vanished from East and South Asia — or, to be more accurate, they were never born at all. Throughout the region, the practice of sex selection — prenatal sex screening followed by selective termination of pregnancies — has yielded a generation packed with boys. From a normal level of 105 boys to 100 girls, the ratio has shifted to 120, 150, and, in some cases, nearly 200 boys born for every 100 girls. In some countries, like South Korea, ratios spiked and are now returning to normal. But sex selection is on the rise in Eastern Europe, Southeast Asia, and the Middle East.

In a new book, “Unnatural Selection: Choosing Boys Over Girls, and the Consequences of a World Full of Men,” American journalist Mara Hvistendahl explores how birth ratios got out of hand and looks into the actual and potential effects on the women, men, and social economies of these regions. While for years the myth has held that any choice of sons occurred through rural infanticide, sex selection turns out to proliferate in the middle and upper classes; parents who have access to obstetric services, ultrasound, and abortion are the ones likely to choose boys. [...]

IDEAS: How did modern sex selection begin to take hold in Asia?

HVISTENDAHL: In the 1960s and ’70s population growth was a huge issue, maybe like climate change today. The concern was genuine, but, unfortunately, in searching for ways to solve the problem, population control organizations came up with all sorts of wild solutions. It turned out to be a pretty dark period for reproductive rights. In the ’70s, 6 million men were sterilized in India, some of them forced. When the president of the Population Council wrote an article for Science in, I think, 1969, he ranked the various methods and ranked sex selection as having a high moral value. Sex selection emerged as a method that would be voluntary, and one that would appeal to those in the developing world, as most couples in those places would keep having children until they had a boy.

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