The Consequence of Unnatural Selection: 160 Million Missing Girls
By Marcy Darnovsky,
Ms. Magazine Blog
| 06. 06. 2011
As best as demographers can figure, the world is short about 160 million girls and women–equivalent to the entire female population of the United States. With numbers of this magnitude in the news from time to time, many people are aware that sex selection is a matter of concern. But most Americans with whom I’ve discussed it consider sex selection somewhat abstract, and certainly faraway and fading–a practice confined to India and China, prevalent among poor people stuck in the sway of ancient traditions. The solution, they tend to assume, lies in economic development and advances in gender equality. In this view, son preference and sex selection, like the so-called population bomb of the 1960s and 1970s, will diminish more or less on their own, as a corollary of modernization and improvements in the status of women.
In the new book Unnatural Selection: Choosing Boys over Girls, and the Consequences of a World Full of Men, out this week, Beijing-based journalist Mara Hvistendahl shows these assumptions to be seriously mistaken. Selecting for sons is growing not just in South...
Related Articles
By Abby McCloskey, The Dallas Morning News | 10.10.2025
We Texans like to do things our way — leave some hide on the fence rather than stay corralled, as goes a line in Wallace O. Chariton’s Texas dictionary This Dog’ll Hunt. Lately, I’ve been wondering what this ethos...
By Jay S. Kaufman, Los Angeles Review of Books | 09.27.2025
This is the 10th installment in the Legacies of Eugenics series, which features essays by leading thinkers devoted to exploring the history of eugenics and the ways it shapes our present. The series is organized by Osagie K. Obasogie in...
By Julia Black, MIT Technology Review | 10.16.2025
Consider, if you will, the translucent blob in the eye of a microscope: a human blastocyst, the biological specimen that emerges just five days or so after a fateful encounter between egg and sperm. This bundle of cells, about the size of...
By Meagan Parrish, PharmaVoice | 10.10.2025
When CEO Ben Lamm steps into the spotlight, it’s usually to talk about his efforts bringing extinct animals back to life. Once a far-flung idea, Lamm and the company he heads, Colossal Biosciences, have proven they can pull it off...