The Global War Against Baby Girls

Why is the world missing 100 million girls?

By Joe Carter, August 24, 2008

If you were asked to name the technologies whose proliferation inadvertently threatens the human race, what would you include? IEDS? Assault rifles? Nuclear warheads?

Add this one to your list: the sonogram machine.

The widespread use of sonogram technology--coupled with liberal abortion laws--has made it possible for women to identify the sex of their child so that those without a Y chromosome can be killed before they're even born. In 2006, at a speech before the U.N., demographer Nicholas Eberstadt revealed the details of this frightening trend:

Over the past five years the American public has received regular updates on what we have come to call “the global war on terror”. A no-less significant global war—a war, indeed, against nature, civilization, and in fact humanity itself has also been underway in recent years. This latter war, however, has attracted much less attention and comment, despite its immense consequence. This world-wide struggle might be called” The Global War Against Baby Girls”.

The effects of this war on girls can be seen in the changes in the sex ratios at birth. Eberstadt explains that there is a "slight but constant and almost unvarying excess of baby boys over baby girls born in any population." The number of baby boys born for every hundred baby girls, which is so constant that it can "qualify as a rule of nature", falls along an extremely narrow range along the order of 103, 104, or 105. On rare occasions it even hovers around 106

These sex ratios vary slightly based on ethnicity. For example, in the U.S. in 1984 the rates were: White: 105.4; Black: 103.1; American Indian: 101.4; Chinese: 104.6; and Japanese 102.6. Such variations, however, remain small and fairly stable over time.

But Eberstadt finds that in the last generation the sex ratio at birth in some parts of the world has become "completely unhinged." Consider this graph from provinces in China in 2000:

The red lines indicate where the rates should be based on what is naturally, biologically possible. Yet in a number of Chinese provinces--with populations of tens of millions of people--the reported sex ratio at birth ranges from over 120 boys for every 100 girls to over 130 boys for every 100 girls. Eberstadt notes that this is "a phenomenon utterly without natural precedent in human history."