Missing women: causes, consequences, and demographic impacts

¶ … Lost Women of China: A Human Rights Issue

Like many societies in Asia (and elsewhere throughout the world) Chinese society it patriarchal, male-centered, and, in ways that very often occur in such male-centered societies, both discriminatory toward girls and women and partial to male offspring. This represents the worst of both worlds, so to speak: if a female Chinese baby is not aborted and is instead born; and is not starved, abused, overworked, or deprived of medical care, or otherwise neglected to the point of death, based entirely on gender, she will in fact grow up to be a woman (at which time she will continue to face constant discrimination within her society. It in not a pretty picture. Clearly, the more than 100 million missing women of China is a human rights issue, on many levels, including some that Sen does not mention. Sen is an economist by training, and therefore views human rights abuses against women, within his article, from an economic, rather than, say, a social, anthropological, anthropological, or other perspective. In many ways, this is the right way to view the human rights abuses within China, because it6 does come down to economics.

In Chinese society, male babies grow up to take care of their parents, when the parents grow old; carry on the family name; take over their parents' farms (a great deal of female infanticide in China occurs in rural areas), and, since they are physically stronger, are more capable of helping their families with hard labor, such as farm work, even as children or adolescents. Combined with the restrictions on having more than one child per family, in order to control population growth, after the 1979 revolution, one can begin to understand, even if not sympathize with, the widespread occurrences in areas of China of female abortion, infanticide, and (if the girl manages to be born) abuse and neglect.

As Sen points out, in "More than 100 Million Women are Missing":

The compulsory measures to control the size of families which were introduced in 1979 may have been an important factor. In some parts of the country the authorities insisted on the "one-child family." This restriction, given the strong preference for boys in China, led to a neglect of girls that was often severe. Some evidence exists of female infanticide. In the early years after the reforms, infant mortality for girls appeared to increase considerably. Some estimates had suggested that the rate of female infant mortality rose from 37.7 per thousand in 1978 to 67.2 per thousand in 1984.

Moreover, according to Sen:

survival prospects of female children clearly have been unfavorably affected by restrictions on the size of the family. Later legal concessions including the permission to have a second child if the first one is a girl) reflect some official recognition of these problems.

Sen's observations and the realities of second-class (or worse) status for girls and women in China raise several kinds of serious human rights issues. The first is the right to determine the size of one's family, a right that the Chinese government, for nearly three decades now, has steadily denied Chinese couples. Good economic rationales may lie behind this government decision; still, it nevertheless denies Chinese couples a basic human right that couples in other parts of the world (although not all: Sanjay Gandhi's involuntary sterilization program in post-1947 India, and the Eugenics Society's involuntary sterilizations of poor minority women in post-World War II America come to mind as other examples) have to determine family size.

Secondly (although it is debatable, depending on one's religious and/or other beliefs) when life begins, even if a female fetus is not yet a person, it should not be aborted, and its parents should not have to feel the necessity of aborting it, just because it is a female. Even if the child itself is not yet human (and many would in fact argue that it is) this is a human rights violation, and a terrible trauma for its parents to have to endure: the killing of their child, based solely on gender, for purely economic reasons. This is the most brutally heartless reality any prospective parent can possibly face.