165,000,000: Choosing Boys Over Girls and the Repercussions on Society

What is the 165,000,000?  That is what we learn in the new non-fiction book Unnatural Selection: Choosing Boys Over Girls, and the Consequences of a World Full of Men by Mara Hvistendahl.   The number is the number of female fetuses aborted in Asia  due to sex selection.  That's more than the current female population in the US.  Now hold your horses.  This isn't a blog on the word  that begins with "A".  I don't go there.  It's like trying to win an argument about who should be the US president.  But, what I did find interesting in this book is that there is a whole heck of a lot going on out there that needs to be known.  Let me see if I can give the book its due justice. The author, Ms Hvistendahl, is pro choice.  What she is interested in and concerned about is...the future of girls in the world.  What I know:  Because of China's overpopulation, they had instituted a 1 child per family policy, that the Chinese family prefers to have sons, that India is overpopulated, that women in Indian society, because of a lack of dowry paid in full,  have often been killed and that the US upholds Roe V Wade. What I didn't know was the extend to which sex selection abortions occurred and I didn't know the involvement of the Western world in causing this phenomena.  Read more...