Unnatural sex selection & its repercussions

[Ahimsa]

In some Asian cities, 150 boys are born for every 100 girls. Noticing the persistence and frequency of that gender imbalance set MARA HVISTENDAHL, science journalist and Asia correspondent for Science magazine, off on an investigation that yielded her new book, Unnatural Selection: Choosing Boys Over Girls, and the Consequences of a World Full of Men. She found that Asia is “missing” 160 million females that otherwise would have been born over the last few decades, and why that is, and its implications for global politics, is the subject of Mara’s new book and this hour of Radio Times. And later today, Mara Hvistendahl is speaking at her alma mater, Swarthmore College, this evening from 4:30-6 in Science Center 101.

 

[Ahimsa]

Yet cultural preferences and China’s one-child policy don’t explain why girls have also gone missing from Albania and Azerbaijan, and why sex ratio imbalance is now appearing in Europe. The global problem demanded a global theory, and Hvistendahl’s is this: Sex selection has arisen out of a drive to control population size, using technology (primarily ultrasound) and abortion as handmaids. And Hvistendahl charges that it’s powerful Western institutions—think General Electric, Rockefeller, the Ford Foundation—that are largely responsible for the world’s gender crisis, for providing the necessary technology.

Hvistendahl also reports that Western groups have funded population control, a fact kept under wraps until Planned Parenthood and the Rockefeller Foundation recently opened their early files. They reveal billions of U.S. dollars sent to India for food loans and public health projects conditioned on population control. The West held its debtor nations hostage, relying on reproductive extortion, which included sterilization campaigns in India, South Korea, and China, and forced abortions and exorbitant fines for more than one child.