Tragedy of the
Commons
In half of the world today, fetuses, infants and toddler girls are being exterminated after birth merely because they are girls. The trend is increasing rapidly,
radically altering male to female ratios worldwide with harrowing consequences.
The United Nations Population Division and the U.S. Census Bureau’s
International Programs Center, the two main organizations charged with
tracking and projecting global population trends, have identified unnaturally
high boy to girl sex ratios in over 50 countries and territories accounting for
over 3.2 billion people, or nearly half of the world’s population.
The population composition of the entire human species is
being distorted. Some blame the
availability of inexpensive technology to conduct sex
selected abortions. However, the focus on sex selected abortion is not entirely
helpful. Where sex selected abortion is
outlawed or unavailable, baby girls are tortured in the most inhumane ways and
left to die in gutters and ditches or smothered. Indian parents are even taking baby girls to doctors turn them into boys with a faux penis and hormones to maintain status.
Rising Price of a Good Woman
In China the “marriage squeeze” means that unlike in 2000
when 96 percent of all males married by their early 40’s to almost a quarter of all men projected to never marry by the year 2040, less
than 30 years from now. Economists have surmised that a shortage of women
should increase their value. While this
may be the case, we are seeing families sell their daughters to groups of men
who pool their money and use her sexually and as a slave, then resell her. Unfortunately, any increased value does not seem to trickle down to the woman. We
can also speculate that a huge group of “excess males” in these populations
with extreme child sex ratios would mean more crime, more trafficking, more prostitution,
more war and so on.
Motivated mostly by greed and status, a tragedy of the commons is underway, where
individual decisions about what benefits one family may be exercised without
regard for the degradation of life for all. This scope of this tragedy makes
Hitler look good. The UN estimates that
over 100 million girls have been killed after birth in the last twenty
years.
It's Not Just an Asian Thing
The west struggles to understand why anyone would take such
drastic measures to annihilate girl babies, though we have a history of son
preference even in the west and the male to female sex ratios are skewed
unnaturally even in America and the United Kingdom within certain populations. Some
believe that the west has contributed to the problem because beginning in the
1960’s we focused on the overpopulation without concern for the
ramifications. We pressured countries to limit their births. The perverse result
was that parents decided if they can only one or two children, they wanted boys
to ensure wealth and status.
There is one bright spot in this female holocaust. South
Korea has lowered their very high male to female birth ratios mostly due to a
change in consciousness probably due to Christian influences.
Since the west probably bears some responsibility for
ushering in this gendercide, we need to be in the forefront creating solutions and
ensuring that the human rights of baby girls are protected.
100 million girls have been silenced before they could even
speak. Who will speak up for them and
hear their cries if not us?
Watch for Part 2 of this series to come.
Sources:
Nicholas Eberstadt, “The Global War Against Baby Girls,” The New Atlantis, Number 33, Fall 2011,
pp.3-18.
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