This is not an upbeat post. No pictures.
In this week's New Statesman there is a report on how the gender ratio of births in Asia is dropping.
In India in 2001, the ratio of births female:male was 927:1000, down from 945:1000 in 1991 and 962:1000 in 1981.
In China official numbers give 855:1000 but experts put it at 826:1000. In some provinces it is down to 769:1000. Other parts of Asia have poor figures too.
Why is it dropping? Reports suggest that the availability of ultrasound scans enables people to discover that their child is female and therefore abort it. What are we doing?
The bitter irony is the Western magazines that insist on putting women on the cover, presumably because it helps sales. My chess magazine came today with Anna Zatonskih on the front. Not an isolated example - I estimate one in three copies of this mag - "Chess" - have a woman on the front. Maybe to encourage the wider take-up of an extremely male-dominated pastime - but maybe just cynicism.
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2 comments:
Is this better though than a child being born and then sold or left to die?
Well abortion has only replaced female infanticide, it's true. But the article then goes on that women, being in short supply, have become a commodity to be bought and sold and there are reports of a 12 year old girl beheaded because she wouldn't sleep with her husband's brother.
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