Table 3. Countries with populations over 1 million reporting child (age 0-4 years) sex ratios above 107 in a recent population census
Biologically impossible SRBs are also now seen in the USA and the UK - within particular ethnic groups. In America, SRBs of 108 were characteristic of the ‘Asian-Pacific’ populations such as Chinese-Americans, Korean-Americans, and Filipino-Americans in the 2000 census [34] and in vital statistics thereafter - populations whose SRBs were within the ‘natural’ biological range a generation ago. In England and Wales, SRBs for Indian-born mothers have also risen markedly, from 104 in the 1980s to 108 in the late 1990s [35]. In both the USA and the UK, these gender disparities were due largely to sharp increases in higher-parity SRBs, strongly suggesting that sex-selective abortions were the driver. The US and UK cases also point to the possibility that sex-selective abortion may be common to other subpopulations in developed or less developed societies, even if these do not affect overall SRBs for the country as a whole.
The Demographic Effect
Sex-selective abortion is by now so widespread and so frequent that it has come to distort the population composition of the entire human species: this new and medicalized war against baby girls is indeed truly global in scale and scope. Estimates by the United Nations Population Division (UNPD) and the US Census Bureau’s International Programs Center (IPC) - the two major organizations charged with tracking and projecting global population trends - make the point (tables 4, 5). By the analysis of the IPC, as of 2010 a total of 21 countries or territories (including a number of European, Middle Eastern, and Pacific Island areas not yet mentioned in this chapter) had child (0-4 years of age) sex ratios of 107 or higher in the year 2010. The total population of the regions said to be beset by unnaturally high SRBs amounted to 2.72 billion, or about 40% of the world’s total population. For its part, the UNPD estimates that 24 countries and territories (a slightly different roster from that of the IPC, including some additional European, South American, Middle Eastern, Asian and Pacific settings not thus far mentioned) had SRBs of 107 or higher for the 2005-2010 period. The total population for these regions in 2010 was estimated at 2.74 billion, or about 39% of the world’s 6.8 billion population that same year. The estimated 2010 population for all of the places flagged by either the UNPD or the IPC for unnaturally high SRBs or child sex ratios would amount to 2.82 billion - about 41% of the total global population - and if we tally in the other places from tables 2 and 3 whose official demographic statistics report unnaturally high SRBs of child sex ratios, we would have a total of over 50 countries and territories accounting for over 3.2 billion people, or roughly 46% of the world’s total population.
By the reckoning of the UNPD, the overall global SRB has already reached biologically impossible heights in the era of sex-selective abortion, rising from 105 in 1975-1980 to 107 for 2005-2010. By the same token, the IPC puts the worldwide under-5 child sex ratio at 107.0 for 2010 (though its global estimates only extend back to the year 2000).
Table 4. UNPD estimates of countries with SRBs above 107 in 2010 and an implied ‘excess male’ population under 20 years of age
To go by both UNPD and IPC reconstructions of local age-sex structures, today’s unnaturally high SRB and/or child sex ratio societies would have had an aggregate ‘boy surplus’ of over 55 million boys and young men under the age of 20 by the year 2010. If we assume that the SRBs and child/youth sex ratios in these societies should be around 105, the unnatural ‘girl deficit’ for females 0-19 years of age as of 2010 would have totaled roughly 34-35 million by both UNDP and IPC figures (tables 4, 5). In both the UNPD and the IPC reckonings, the world’s two most populous countries, China and India, would account for the overwhelming majority (33-34 million) of the world’s ‘missing girls’ under 20 years of age in our era of sex-selective abortion. However, the implied UNPD and IPC totals for China and India themselves differ substantially, in accordance with their assumptions concerning such things as the extent of undercounting of girls. Irrespective of differences in IPC-and UNPD-based estimates for given countries, these global estimates for ‘missing girls’ under 20 are arguably quite conservative figures, excluding as they do numerous countries - some of them quite populous - where evidence of unnaturally high SRBs has been emerging from vital registration or national census data [36], and setting a ‘high bar’ as a threshold for calculations of ‘excess males’ (some researchers would, and in fact do, argue that benchmarks of 104, 103, or perhaps even lower would be suitable for such exercises).
Table 5. US Census Bureau estimates of countries with child (age 0-4 years) sex ratios above 107 in 2010and an implied’excess male’population under 20 years of age
Social Implications
The consequences of medically-abetted mass feticide are far reaching and manifestly adverse. In populations with unnaturally skewed SRBs, the very fact that many thousands - or in some cases, millions - of prospective girls and young women have been deliberately eliminated simply because they would have been female establishes a new social reality that inescapably colors the whole realm of human relationships, redefining the role of women as the disfavored sex in nakedly utilitarian terms and indeed signaling that their very existence is now conditional and contingent.
Moreover, enduring and extreme SRB imbalances set the demographic stage for an incipient ‘marriage squeeze’ in affected populations, especially where subreplacement is reducing the future pool of potential brides. China’s persistently elevated SRBs, for example, stand to transform it from a country where as of 2000 nearly all males (about 96%) had been married by their early 40s to one in which nearly a quarter (23%) are projected to be never married as of 2040, less than 30 years from now.5 Such a transformation augurs ill in a number of respects. For one thing, unmarried men appear to suffer greater health risks than their married counterparts, even after controlling for exogenous social and environmental factors;6 a sharp increase in the proportion of essentially unmarriageable males in a society with a universal marriage norm may only accentuate those health risks. In a low-income society lacking sturdy and reliable national pension guarantees for the elderly,
