Tag Archives: Choice

The worldwide war on baby girls

This article is from the left-wing magazine The Economist, which is pro-abortion and pro-Obama.

Excerpt:

Gendercide—to borrow the title of a 1985 book by Mary Anne Warren—is often seen as an unintended consequence of China’s one-child policy, or as a product of poverty or ignorance. But that cannot be the whole story. The surplus of bachelors—called in China guanggun, or “bare branches”— seems to have accelerated between 1990 and 2005, in ways not obviously linked to the one-child policy, which was introduced in 1979. And, as is becoming clear, the war against baby girls is not confined to China.

Parts of India have sex ratios as skewed as anything in its northern neighbour. Other East Asian countries—South Korea, Singapore and Taiwan—have peculiarly high numbers of male births. So, since the collapse of the Soviet Union, have former communist countries in the Caucasus and the western Balkans. Even subsets of America’s population are following suit, though not the population as a whole.

The real cause, argues Nick Eberstadt, a demographer at the American Enterprise Institute, a think-tank in Washington, DC, is not any country’s particular policy but “the fateful collision between overweening son preference, the use of rapidly spreading prenatal sex-determination technology and declining fertility.” These are global trends. And the selective destruction of baby girls is global, too.

Boys are slightly more likely to die in infancy than girls. To compensate, more boys are born than girls so there will be equal numbers of young men and women at puberty. In all societies that record births, between 103 and 106 boys are normally born for every 100 girls. The ratio has been so stable over time that it appears to be the natural order of things.

That order has changed fundamentally in the past 25 years. In China the sex ratio for the generation born between 1985 and 1989 was 108, already just outside the natural range. For the generation born in 2000-04, it was 124 (ie, 124 boys were born in those years for every 100 girls). According to CASS the ratio today is 123 boys per 100 girls. These rates are biologically impossible without human intervention.

The national averages hide astonishing figures at the provincial level. According to an analysis of Chinese household data carried out in late 2005 and reported in the British Medical Journal, only one region, Tibet, has a sex ratio within the bounds of nature. Fourteen provinces—mostly in the east and south—have sex ratios at birth of 120 and above, and three have unprecedented levels of more than 130. As CASS says, “the gender imbalance has been growing wider year after year.”

Make no mistake. Pro-choice is anti-woman.

Melanie Phillips has a radical plan to stop the breakdown of marriages

From the UK Daily Mail.

Here’s the problem:

Devastating new research by sociologist Geoff Dench shows that not only is one in four mothers single, but more than half of such mothers have never lived with a man at all and are choosing to live alone on state benefits.

[…]Back in the mists of time … relationships between men and women were based on a bargain between the sexes which, although never stated openly, everyone accepted as a given.

Women realised they needed the father of their children to stick around to help bring them up.

In turn, men committed themselves to the mothers of their children on the basis that they could trust they were indeed the father because the woman was sexually faithful.

Today, this bargain has been all but destroyed. A number of factors have conspired to make women and girls think they can go it alone without men.

The first has been that so many women work and are therefore economically independent. Next was the sexual revolution which saw women becoming as sexually free as men.

In short order, any stigma over having babies out of wedlock was abolished. Then there was the collapse of manufacturing industry, which deprived many boys of the job prospects which once made them an attractive, marriageable proposition.

Finally, the coup de grace was administered by welfare benefits to single mothers which enabled them to live without the support of their babies’ fathers.

The result of all this was that many women and girls decided they no longer needed their children’s fathers to be part of the family unit.

This has given rise to an increasing number of women-only households where fathers have been written out of the family script for three or four generations or more.

The consequences of such family disintegration – as is now indisputable – are in general catastrophic for both individuals and for society.

This problem will not be cracked, however, unless women come to believe once again that their interests lie in attracting one man to father their children and then stick with them. Which is where my proposal of a Man Benefit comes in.

Click here to find out what the “Man Benefit” is. This is a fine article, and every man and woman who wants to understand how big government government causes the destruction of the family should read it. Then forward it to all of your friends. I think that we have a problem today where we just don’t think intelligently about what it takes to have a good marriage. Does government help children to grow up in stable homes, or does government make it more likely for children to grow up in a broken home? What does the evidence say?

This column by Stephen Baskerville is a nice follow-up to Melanie’s article.

John Stossel’s documentary about public schools and school choice

Awesome: (41 minutes)

The documentary features Jay Greene, and his book “Education Myths”, which I recommend.

Here’s an article from Jay P. Greene in National Review.

Excerpt:

This year, when you hear President Obama and congressional Democrats talk about increasing government spending to create jobs, you should understand that it isn’t really about jobs. It’s about paying off powerful interest groups that helped these Democrats gain power — a fact that’s clear from the billions they’ve directed to education.

Last month, President Obama held a jobs summit, after which he urged Congress to spend some of the money being repaid by bailed-out banks on programs to address unemployment. The House of Representatives responded by drafting legislation that, according to the Washington Post, “provides $23 billion to help states pay teacher salaries.” The curious thing is that education has actually seen an expansion in payrolls over the last two years, while every other major sector of the economy (save health care) has seen huge job losses.

According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the number of people employed peaked in November 2007. Over the next two years, the private sector lost more than 7 million jobs. The construction industry lost more than 1.5 million jobs. Manufacturing lost more than 2 million jobs. The education-and-health-services category, however, added more than 900,000 jobs.

My previous post on education featured a video on school choice from the Cato Institute.