Missing Women of China: Gender Discrimination as a Human Rights Issue

Introduction: China's Patriarchal Society and the Missing Women

Like many societies in Asia — and elsewhere throughout the world — Chinese society is patriarchal, male-centered, and, in ways that very often occur in such societies, both discriminatory toward girls and women and partial to male offspring. This represents the worst of both worlds: if a female Chinese baby is not aborted and is instead born, and is not starved, abused, overworked, deprived of medical care, or otherwise neglected to the point of death based entirely on her gender, she will grow up to face constant discrimination within her society. It is not a pretty picture.

Clearly, the more than 100 million missing women of China represent 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 perspective rather than a social, anthropological, or other vantage point. In many ways, this is the right framework through which to view the human rights abuses within China, because they do ultimately come down to economics.

Economic Roots of Son Preference in Rural China

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

The One-Child Policy and Its Impact on Female Survival

As Amartya 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."

Human Rights Violations: Reproductive Choice and Gender-Based Abortion

Sen's observations and the realities of second-class 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, steadily denied Chinese couples. Good economic rationales may lie behind this government decision; still, it nevertheless denies Chinese couples a basic human right. Couples in other parts of the world have not always been spared such violations either: Sanjay Gandhi's involuntary sterilization program in post-independence India, and the Eugenics Society's involuntary sterilizations of poor minority women in post-World War II America come to mind as comparable examples of state-imposed denial of reproductive choice.

Secondly — and it is debatable, depending on one's religious and other beliefs, exactly when life begins — even if a female fetus is not yet considered a person, she should not be aborted, and her parents should not feel the necessity of aborting her simply because of her sex. Even if the child is not yet fully human in a legal or philosophical sense (and many would argue that she is), this constitutes a human rights violation and a terrible trauma for her parents: the killing of their child, based solely on gender, for purely economic reasons. This is among the most brutally heartless realities any prospective parent can possibly face.