Is the women’s equality movement leading to the extinction of females? China’s coercive one-child policy is well known but other countries are freely expressing a population preference with similar dire consequences in the works. The United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) is well known for the promotion of gender equality through “reproductive health and reproductive rights” and provides assistance to individual countries for many population related matters. Inter alia, the latter includes the financing of various studies to collect, analyze and disseminate population data. One such study Recent Increase in the Sex Ratio at Birth in Vietnam: A Review of Evidence [1] provided some astounding analysis relating to abortion consequences in Vietnam: a dynamic country with a population of 87 million – 14th highest in the world – with a 90% literacy rate and a fertility rate of 1.83 that is just below replacement (2.1). While these data were not in the Report, they form a useful background/perspective for the findings.

As a result of data collected from the 1999 population census and subsequent Annual Population Surveys conducted by Vietnam’s General Statistics Office, it was determined that the Sex Ratio at Birth (SRB) had exceeded the norm, was increasing annually and had reached "a considerably high level of 110/100" by 2006. That is, 110 boys were being born for every 100 girls. The global norm, established by the Creator, is considered to be a ratio of 104-106/100 according to demographers and “under normal circumstances it is quite stable over time, across geographical regions, continents, countries and races.”

Estimates for 2007 show that the SRB rose further to 111/100 and appears to be growing by a factor of one each year. Vietnam already has a higher ratio than India as a whole although, the Report notes, in certain Asian regions (East China and Northern India) the "SRB levels are often above 125."

But how did Vietnam get to this point? Somewhat hesitantly, the Report mentions these contributing factors: the increased availability of sex-identification technology (ultrasound and amniocentesis) and the long-standing preference for males in a patriarchal society. While stressing the need for more analysis, the Report merely footnotes the fact that data have not been compiled "for sex selection as a particular of abortion practices in the country." However, even a casual observer will notice a connection between skewed SRB data and readily available abortion "services." Moreover, "male preference" is not a recent phenomenon but an ingrained tenet that UN gender policies have done nothing to address!

Indeed, the Report notes the choice of sons is "very strong" in instances of first births – perhaps an offshoot of the overall fertility decline which includes preference for only one child. Baby girls are not allowed to be born as nature intended, or if they are they may be given in adoption (usually for compensation), starved or abandoned, although this is more true of India where the mortality rate for children under five is unduly high relative to other developing countries.

An American TV advertisement of many years ago had a punch line: "It's not nice to fool Mother Nature!"[2]  In many Asian countries couples have done just that in indulging their preferences and ignoring future consequences. If current trends continue, Vietnam would catch up with the other Asian regions – with similar consequences 25 or so years down the road when, at marriage age, men will note a scarcity of likely brides. As a result, there could be marriage at earlier ages for females, increased trafficking of women across borders, and possible belligerency on the part of males either in pursuit of women or in a military sense.

In essence, this is a Report on the negative consequences of abortion – hardly the kind one has been led to expect from UNFPA. Does Thoraya Obaid, the UNFPA Executive Director who has spent more than three decades at the UN, understand that her pursuit of reproductive choice and gender equality have turned into reproductive "sororicide" and gender distortion?

The UN may not be Capistrano…..but I think I see a swallow!

Vincenzina Santoro is an international economist living in New York. She represents the American Family Association of New York.

Notes
[1] United Nations Population Fund, “Recent Increase in the Sex Ratio at Birth in Viet Nam: A Review of Evidence”, September 2009, 56 pages. The study was a tripartite effort by the UNFPA, the Vietnamese General Statistics Office and the French demographer Christophe Guilmoto who did the analysis and prepared the Report, and originated from the findings of the Vietnamese statistical authorities. Unless otherwise noted, all quotes in this memo are from this source.

[2] This was an ad for a margarine, which supposedly tasted just like butter!

The penny has finally dropped for the Chinese government. The Chinese Academy of Social Sciences has admitted that gender imbalance because of its draconian one-child policy is a serious problem. In a report in the Chinese newspaper Global Times, demographers Wang Guangzhou and Wang Yuesheng sketched some of China’s intractable problems.

Sex-selective abortions: "extremely commonplace, especially in rural areas".

Scarcity of wives in rural areas: men in poorer parts of China will have to accept late marriage or no marriage at all. "The chance of getting married will be rare if a man is more than 40 years old in the countryside. They will be more dependent on social security as they age and have fewer household resources to rely on."

Abductions and trafficking of women: "rampant" in areas with excess numbers of men, according to the National Population and Family Planning Commission.

Illegal marriages and forced prostitution: also problematic.

The normal male-female ratio is between 103-107 males for every 100 females. But in 2005, the last year for which data are available in China, there were 119 boys for every 100 girls. In some areas the male-female ratio was as high as 130 males for every 100 females.

All this is old news, but it may be the first time that an official government body has acknowledged the horrific consequences of requiring couples to stop at one child. ~ London Telegraph, Jan 11

With a population of 141.9 million, Russia is registering a growth for the first time since 1995, says Prime Minister Vladimir Putin. For the past five years the number of Russian deaths had declined, while births had risen. Life-expectancy is about to reach the age of 69.

"We can say with a high degree of confidence that Russia will register a growth in population for the first time since 1995," said Mr Putin at an end-of-year government meeting broadcast on state television. A spokesman said that while the total growth was a minuscule 20,000, it was a "symbolic" milestone.

In part, the good news is due to Mr Putin himself. As demographer Carl Haub points out in the Population Reference Bureau blog "Behind the Numbers", in 2007 his government decided to give US$9,000 to women upon the birth of a second child. In 2007, births jumped nearly 9 percent over 2006 and, in 2008, by 6.4 percent over 2007. Russia’s total fertility rate (TFR) now stands at 1.49 (2008), up from its lowest slump of 1.16 in 1999.

Demographically things are still grim for Russia. The native population actually declined by about 224,000 last year. This is a lot better than the decline of 958,000 in 2000. The population will probably remain stable because of immigration from Central Asia and other former Soviet republics.

However, Mr Haub advises Russians not to celebrate yet. Things are going to get worse soon.

The number of young people moving up the age ladder into the prime childbearing ages is much less than those now in the childbearing years. As of January 1, 2009, there were 6.2 million females in the age group 20-24. The 15-19 age group was only 4.5 million and both the 5-9 and 10-14 age groups taken together totaled 6.5 million. As those younger age groups begin childbearing, births will certainly decline even if the TFR rises. Beyond that, deaths will rise as the elderly population grows significantly in size.

Gee, I missed this one from the hoo-haa surrounding the Copenhagen Summit. Sorry…

How can anyone dislike Boris Johnson, former editor of the Spectator, former MP, former shadow minister for the Conservatives, an old Etonian with unkempt blonde hair, a harum-scarum poupourri of astonishing talent and schoolboy silliness? He is currently mayor of London and his obiter dicta are faithfully reported by the London press. Like this one:

"There is no doubt that humanity faces a risk of environmental catastrophe. We are replicating too fast, hurtling towards nine billion souls on the planet like bacteria multiplying on a Petri dish."

How many children does dear old Boris have? Four. Are you scuttling around on the Petri dish with the other bacteria, Boris, old son, or is it just the benighted people south of the Equator? ~ London Evening Standard, Dec 14

Bangladesh is going to introduce a voluntary "one couple, one child" population planning policy by 2015 to curb its growing population.

The Director General of the Directorate of Family Planning Mohammad Abdul Qayyum told the Chinese news agency Xinhua that: "The Chinese policy influenced us in framing our policy though we are not making it mandatory." He said that the government plans to promote a "No more than two children, one is best".

"We are eager to develop relationship with Chinese population planning authorities for training our men, using modern contraceptive and other related matters," Qayyum said.

According to the government’s draft policy, one-child families will have preference in state schools and will be eligible for financial grants.

With a population of about 150 million and a birth rate of about 2.7 children per woman, Bangladesh is said to be the most densely populated country in the world. According to Mr Qayyum, "Overpopulation is a burden for the country. If we fail to achieve our target to reduce the present birth rate, it will soon be difficult to meet the basic demands of people. We may even fail to achieve the Millennium Development Goals by its targeted period of 2015."

News accounts of this initiative are sketchy, but administering it will be cumbersome: 21 ministries will be involved; religious leaders will have to be persuaded to promote the policy. It is unclear how the rights of the girl-child will be respected. According to an interview with Mr Qayyam in The Daily Star newspaper, "The policy will also encourage every fertile woman to give birth to only one girl child during her total reproduction age." ~ Xinhua, Dec 23; Daily Star, Dec 14;

 

Arguments from authority are very weak indeed, but when the authority is John Lennon, what the heck.

Check out this brief clip from an undated interview with Lennon and Yoko Ono on the Dick Cavett show.

Someone in the audience asks Yoko Ono about over-population and she expresses her scepticism. Then Lennon chips in, “I don’t really believe it… I think we’ve got enough food and money to feed everybody… There’s enough room for us and some of us can go to the Moon anyway.”

“I think you’re wrong about that,” says Cavett.

“Oh, I don’t care,” Lennon responds. It seems that he thinks that the population bomb was a beat-up by the government to distract the public from really important issues like Vietnam and Northern Ireland. 

It doesn’t prove anything, I suppose, but at least I’m in good company. ~ HT to John Smeaton.

China’s rapid economic development and America’s evident vulnerabilty after the Global Financial Crisis could make the Chinese a bit smug. But as leading demographer Nicholas Eberstadt points out in a frightening article in the Far Eastern Economic Review, China faces gigantic economic problems as the legacy of its one-child policy.

Inexorably—and by now inescapably—a host of new and unfamiliar demographic problems have arisen, all of which will plague China's next generation. These problems will compromise economic development, strain social harmony and place the traditional Chinese family structure under severe pressure; in fact, they could shake Chinese civilization to its very foundations.

First of all, China’s impressive growth rate has been fuelled by abundant cheap labour. But a repeat performance is unlikely. China’s population is about to start ageing rapidly and each generation of workers will be 20% smaller than the previous one.

Instead, leading Chinese economists—among them Professor Cai Fang, director of the Institute of Population and Labor Economics at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences—argue that the Chinese economy has already reached a turning point where those seemingly unlimited reserves of rural labor have actually been tapped out, and any future increase in demand for labor will only be supplied by increasing wages.

Then, there is the “senior tsunami”. By 2035, one out of four rural dwellers will be over 65. Although Japan has the highest proportion of elderly in the world, its problems will be dwarfed by those of China., whose per capita income is 15 to 20 times lower than Japan’s. As nearly everyone knows, or ought to know, the US has a serious problem with its unfunded social security system. But its liabilities are equivalent to four months of total economic output. China’s, on the other hand, are more than 100% of GDP. “The existing social security system is doomed to collapse under its own weight,” says Eberstadt.

Add to this, the gender imbalance, which we have covered before in Demography Is Destiny. By 2020 about 20% of China's rural men between the ages of 35 to 44 will never have been married. What will happen?

Speculating about this is almost like imagining the end to a science fiction story—the drama takes us into a universe whose coordinates are far removed from the world we know. Even so, what may be hardest of all to imagine is that at the end of the day, this profound demographic disjuncture would leave China's economy, society and polity altogether unaffected.

The most subtle part of Eberstadt’s analysis has to do with China’s way of doing business. The family has always been central to its economy. But Chinese are growing up now in a “kin-less” society in which their only blood relatives are ancestors and descendants. They will have no siblings or cousins.

What will become of Chinese economic performance when this key element of the country's growth formula is radically altered? One can of course imagine compensating social adaptations, such as a more reliable rule of law or deeper affinities to friends. But if history is any guide, such social adaptations are often slow and halting, and there is no guarantee that they will emerge in time to remedy the loss of social capital that is taking place before our eyes.

No one can predict the future with certainty, but the legacy of the one-child policy could put the devastation of Mao’s Great Leap Forward in the shade, says Eberstadt.

 

Not even the journalists reporting from the Copenhagen summit on climate change understand all the complex economic and technological strategies for reducing the world's carbon footprint and averting catastrophic global warming -- let alone the rest of us. There's cap and trade, emissions trading schemes, carbon taxes, discount rates and a phonebook of acronyms. But there is one equation which could be a very easy sell to save the world: fewer people = fewer carbon footprints.

This has been the theme of the United Nations Population Fund and other Malthusian groups for years. But it has been repackaged as a carbon offset program by a British group, the Optimum Population Trust, which British sociologist Frank Furedi describes in the on-line magazine Spiked as 'an odious... zombie-like Malthusian organisation devoted to the cause of human depletion”. Forget planting trees, wind power or solar energy. The cheapest way to reduce human-generated carbon output is contraception.

To help people invest in contraception and family planning, it has devised what it calls “PopOffsets” -- “the first project in the world that, simply and transparently, enables individuals and organizations to offset their carbon footprint by funding the unmet need for family planning”. At the PopOffsets website you can calculate how much it will cost to offset your carbon footprint for a year if you invest it in family planning. The OPT has calculated that every US$7 spent on world family planning will prevent one birth in a developing country. As it repeats over and over again, “a ‘non-person’ cannot produce CO2 (nor can their non-descendants”. It estimates that “every £4 spent on family planning saves one tonne of CO2.  A similar reduction would require an £8 investment in tree planting, £15 in wind power, £31 in solar energy and £56 in hybrid vehicle technology.”

Preventing births of poor people (most of them in Africa) is basically the OPT's plan for the planet -- rather than helping them grow richer.. As it puts it, “one less birth into poverty is not only one less person to suffer poverty and the expected severe impacts of climate change, but also one less to produce more greenhouse gases in (hopefully) escaping poverty”.

Incredibly, this proposal is being backed by some glittering names. David Attenborough, the famous documentary maker, is a patron of the OPT, and a strong supporter of limiting population. Paul Ehrlich, an ardent campaigner for  population control, Jane Goodall, the chimpanzee expert, and James Lovelock, the originator of the Gaia hypothesis are amongst the other patrons.

Professor Furedi -- a secular humanist with a Marxist background -- argues that this Malthusian initiative discounts human ingenuity and creativity and shows a distrust for humanity itself:

What is truly disturbing about this, from a humanist perspective, is not simply that there is a silent crusade against the unique quality of human life, but that there is an almost complete absence of anger about it, a lack of any critical reaction against it. In modern times, there have always been small coteries of Malthusians, eugenic fantasists and bitter misanthropists who were estranged from children and who regarded babies as an imposition on their existences. Thankfully, these people tended to be consigned to the margins of society. Not any more.

Why is it that, today, the provision of contraception can be promoted as a sensible way of reducing carbon emissions? How do we account for the silence of religious movements whose theology still upholds the unique status of human life? And why are prominent so-called humanists so uninterested in countering this lethal Malthusian challenge to some of the most important ideals that emerged during the Renaissance and later developed through the Enlightenment?

However repugnant and racist this idea seems, its simplicity could be attractive to many people.

Al Gore’s latest book has just hit the bookshops. Our Choice: A Plan to Solve the Climate Crisis is a lavishly illustrated handbook for climate-change activism. "Our Choice gathers in one place all of the most effective solutions that are available now and that, together, will solve this crisis," he says in the introduction. "It is meant to depoliticize the issue as much as possible and inspire readers to take action—not only on an individual basis but as participants in the political processes by which every country, and the world as a whole, makes the choice that now confronts us."

There is even a "young reader edition" for bedtime reading, with all the complex diagrams and mathematical analysis in An Inconvenient Truth condensed into memorable slogans for tender minds.

Ever since losing the 2000 election, Mr Gore has showed that he is many things: not just a politician, but a showman to shame P.T. Barnum, a businessman, a film producer, and a Nobel Prize winner. Now, it seems, he is vying to become the poet laureate of climate change. The introduction features this 21-line poem, or seven terse haikus strung together on a thread of fearful prognistication. Mark Hertsgaard, writing in Vanity Fair, praised it as "beautiful, evocative, and disturbing". The last adjective is right – the metre and metaphors certainly are disturbing for anyone who appreciates poetry. It's as if Helen Steiner Rice had tried to put the Book of Revelations into verse.

Here it is – a MercatorNet exclusive (pirated from a book in Borders):

One thin September soon
A floating continent disappears
In midnight sun

Vapors rise as
Fever settles on an acid sea
Neptune’s bones dissolve

Snow glides from the mountain
Ice fathers floods for a season
A hard rain comes quickly

Then dirt is parched
Kindling is placed in the forest
For the lightning’s celebration

Unknown creatures
Take their leave, unmourned
Horsemen ready their stirrups

Passion seeks heroes and friends
The bell of the city
On the hill is rung

The shepherd cries
The hour of choosing has arrived
Here are your tools

Who is the shepherd, do you think? Who is guiding us into the land of milk and honey? Who is ringing the bells in the City on the Hill? Is it Al the Prophet? What are the tools? His book? If we all buy one for Christmas, will Al become very rich?

I have heard it said that in the United States there are 1 million people who read poetry – and 2 million people who write it. Give it up, Al. Stick to writing memos.

I hope you are brushing up on your Amharic. By 2050, Ethiopia will be the tenth largest country in the world, in terms of population, at about 145 milliion. So it is worthwhile paying attention to social trends there. One talking point in the Ethiopian media is whether it will be a majority Muslim or a majority Christian country. According to the Population Reference Bureau (PRB), the situation is far from clear.

Figures from a 2007 survey showed that Muslims were 34% of the population, Ethiopian Orthodoxy 44% and Protestants 19%. The fastest-growing group is the Protestants, who grew from 14% to 19% between 1994 and 2007. Muslims have grown faster, however, in urban areas.

Ethiopia is still an agricultural nation -- 84% of the population in rural areas. The total fertility rate (TFR) has fallen below replacement level (2.1 children per woman) in the capital Addis Ababa, but it is 3.5 children per woman in towns, and remains above 6 children per women in the country. Overall the Muslim fertility rate is higher, especially in areas where Muslims and Christians are roughly equal in population. But it is very difficult to predict what the balance will be in 2050 because Ethiopia is a patchwork of ethnic groups. The PRB says:

The complex web of traditional culture, regional differences, rural community structure, and ethnicity strongly influences the lagging rural fertility transition, rapid population growth, and uneven geographic distribution in both major religions in Ethiopia. The role of religious identity is not as influential on fertility as other sociocultural factors.