Over the past three decades the world has come to witness an ominous and entirely new form of gender discrimination: sex-selective feticide, implemented through the practice of surgical abortion with the assistance of information gained through prenatal gender determination technology. All around the world, the victims of this new practice are overwhelmingly female — in fact, almost universally female. The practice has become so ruthlessly routine in many contemporary societies that it has impacted their very population structures, warping the balance between male and female births and consequently skewing the sex ratios for the rising generation toward a biologically unnatural excess of males. This still-growing international predilection for sex-selective abortion is by now evident in the demographic contours of dozens of countries around the globe — and it is sufficiently severe that it has come to alter the overall sex ratio at birth of the entire planet, resulting in millions upon millions of new “missing baby girls” each year. In terms of its sheer toll in human numbers, sex-selective abortion has assumed a scale tantamount to a global war against baby girls. ...

Social Implications
The consequences of medically abetted mass feticide are far-reaching and manifestly adverse. In populations with unnaturally skewed SRBs, the very fact that many thousands — or in some cases, millions — of prospective girls and young women have been deliberately eliminated simply because they would have been female establishes a new social reality that inescapably colors the whole realm of human relationships, redefining the role of women as the disfavored sex in nakedly utilitarian terms, and indeed signaling that their very existence is now conditional and contingent.

Moreover, enduring and extreme SRB imbalances set the demographic stage for an incipient “marriage squeeze” in affected populations, with notably reduced pools of potential future brides. China’s persistently elevated SRBs, for example, stand to transform it from a country where as of 2000 nearly all males (about 96 percent) had been married by their early 40s to one in which nearly a quarter (23 percent) are projected to be never married as of 2040, less than 30 years from now, according to a 2008 analysis by the demographer Zeng Yi and colleagues in the journal Genus. Such a transformation augurs ill in a number of respects. For one thing, unmarried men appear to suffer greater health risks than their married counterparts, even after controlling for exogenous social and environmental factors; a sharp increase in the proportion of essentially unmarriageable males in a society with a universal marriage norm may only accentuate those health risks. In a low-income society lacking sturdy and reliable national pension guarantees for the elderly, a steep rise in the proportion of unmarried and involuntarily childless men begs the question of old-age support for that rising cohort. Economists such as Gary Becker and Judge Richard Posner have hypothesized that mass feticide, in making women scarce, will only increase their “value” — but in settings where the legal and personal rights of the individual are not secure and inviolable, the “rising value of women” can have perverse and unexpected consequences, including increased demand for prostitution and an upsurge in the kidnapping and trafficking of women (as is now being witnessed in some women-scarce areas in Asia, as reported by Mara Hvistendahl in her new book Unnatural Selection).

Finally, there is the speculative question of the social impact of a sudden addition of a large cohort of young “excess males” to populations with sustained extreme SRBs: depending on a given country’s cultural and institutional capabilities for coping with this challenge, such trends could quite conceivably lead to increased crime, violence, and social tensions — or possibly even a greater proclivity for social instability. (For a decidedly pessimistic but studied assessment of these prospects, see Valerie M. Hudson and Andrea M. den Boer’s 2004 book Bare Branches: The Security Implications of Asia’s Surplus Male Population.)

All in all, mass sex selection can be regarded as a “tragedy of the commons” dynamic, in which the aggregation of individual (parental) choices has the inadvertent result of degrading the quality of life for all — and some much more than others. ...

Considerations for the Future
There is, however, one country thus far that has managed to return from grotesquely imbalanced SRBs to normal human ratios: South Korea. As explained by Woojin Chung and Monica Das Gupta in 2007 in Population and Development Review, there is still considerable dispute about the factors involved in this turnaround, with many institutions and actors ready to take credit (as the old saying goes: success has many fathers). Available evidence, however, seems to suggest that South Korea’s SRB reversal was influenced less by government policy than by civil society: more specifically, by the spontaneous and largely uncoordinated congealing of a mass movement for honoring, protecting, and prizing daughters. In effect, this movement — drawing largely but by no means exclusively on the faith-based community — sparked a national conversation of conscience about the practice of female feticide. This conversation was instrumental in stigmatizing the practice, not altogether unlike the way in which nationwide conversations of conscience helped to stigmatize international slave-trading in other countries in earlier times. The best hope today in the global war against baby girls may be to carry this conversation of conscience to other lands. Medical and health care professionals — without whose assistance mass female feticide could not occur — have a special obligation to be front and center in this dialogue.

Labels: abortion, Asia, China, demographics, gender, girls, Hong Kong, India, population control, Singapore, South Korea, Taiwan, Vietnam

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Economic progress is not the only indicator of a country's development, a nation requires its people to show courage against social pressures and overcome social evils, said President Pratibha Devisingh Patil on Wednesday after meeting five teenagers from West Bengal who fought social and family pressure and resisted child marriage.

The girls, with little education and almost no support, turned down marriage proposals and faced the anger of their families and the community. Their stories of courage impressed the President so much that she got them invited to the Rashtrapati Bhavan.

They earned praise from the President, who described them as “icons” and asked them to share their stories and encourage girls to say no to under-age marriages. ...

“It is a very big honour to be here and meet the President. The last time we were here in 2008, before leaving home we were taunted by the community members. But when we returned with Madam's [President] blessings, everyone was impressed,” said Afsana, a Class VI student who hit the headlines in 2008 for calling off her wedding.

Labels: child marriage, children, girls, India

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A strong socio-cultural preference for boys in conservative Asian societies is blamed for most of the sex selection. In overwhelmingly patriarchal India, dowry makes daughters expensive. China's one-child policy is thought to be a trigger as women abort girls to have a single boy.

But the story of sex selection in Asia is not as simple as it looks from the outside, writes award-winning science journalist Mara Hvistendahl in her startling new book Unnatural Selection.

Hvistendahl points a finger at the West for encouraging the epidemic of sex selection which has gripped Asia since the early 1970s.

Amniocentesis tests and ultrasound scans have led to more than 160 million girls being aborted in Asia alone since then, according to one widely quoted 2005 estimate.

It had to do, Hvistendahl writes, with the West's paranoid population control movement during the Cold War - a growing fear that more hungry babies would grow up and turn to communism. The "monster of sex determination in Asia" lead to vastly skewed ratios in countries like India, China and South Korea.

Western money, she writes, was used to set up an extensive network of family planning advisers and doctors that encouraged women to opt for amniocentesis.

That's not all. Throughout the late 1960s and early 70s, writes Hvistendahl, influential US experts supported sex selection in academic papers and government-sponsored seminars - "a disturbed sort of technological sexism".

In 1969, sex determination was included as one of the 12 new strategies for global birth control at a US workshop. Henry Kissinger, then secretary of state under Richard Nixon, signed a classified memo stating that "abortion is vital to the solution" of population growth in the world.

Labels: abortion, girls, India, population control

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Does India need a new independence struggle?

The fight this time would not be against British colonialism, but rather against the United Kingdom's approach to regulating reproductive medicine. At a time when India is considering a sort of match-making service for Western couples seeking to hire Indian surrogate mothers, the UK government has announced the abolition of two leading medical regulatory agencies.

Meanwhile, as these countries move farther down the road to free markets in reproductive medicine, France is debating all of its bioethics laws - and continuing to stand up for a different model - focused on social justice and protection of vulnerable women. There is an alternative simply to letting the market decide, the French Assembly insists. ...

Proponents of the Assisted Reproductive Technologies Regulation Bill 2010, now before the Indian Parliament, employ a similar rhetorical twist. They say that the bill actually protects surrogate mothers - for example, by limiting the number of pregnancies they can undergo. But the law would make surrogacy contracts legally binding, requiring the mother to give up the baby even if she changes her mind.

Opponents say that the agencies making the arrangements will be the biggest winners - that the huge profits they reap will dwarf the fees paid by foreign couples to the women bearing their children. As NB Sarojini and Aastha Sharma wrote in the Indian Journal of Medical Ethics, "The Bill actively promotes medical tourism in India for reproductive purposes."

Labels: donor conception, economics, Europe, France, India, poverty, surrogate motherhood, United Kingdom

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The room is large and airy, the stone floors clean and cool — a welcome respite from the afternoon sun. Until your eyes take in the horror that it holds. Ten severely malnourished children — nine of them girls.

The starving girls in this hospital ward include a 21-month-old with arms and legs the size of twigs and an emaciated 1-year-old with huge, vacant eyes. Without urgent medical care, most will not live to see their next birthday.

They point to a painful reality revealed in India's most recent census: Despite a booming economy and big cities full of luxury cars and glittering malls, the country is failing its girls.

Early results show India has 914 girls under age 6 for every 1,000 boys. A decade ago, many were horrified when the ratio was 927 to 1,000. ...

Part of the reason Indians favor sons is the enormous expense in marrying off girls. Families often go into debt arranging marriages and paying elaborate dowries. A boy, on the other hand, will one day bring home a bride and dowry. Hindu custom also dictates that only sons can light their parents' funeral pyres.

But it's not simply that girls are more expensive for impoverished families. The census data shows that the worst offenders are the relatively wealthy northern states of Punjab and Haryana.

Labels: abortion, children, girls, India, Marriage

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...A large scale youth survey conducted under the aegis of the Union health ministry in the six states of Andhra Pradesh, Bihar, Jharkhand, Maharashtra, Rajasthan and Tamil Nadu has thrown up some interesting findings.

Around 15% of young men and 4% young women interviewed admitted to having pre-marital sex. Shockingly, 24% of the women had premarital sex for the first time before age 15 compared to 9% men.

Premarital sex was also found to be more common in rural India.

According to the report prepared by Population Council, Delhi, and International Institute of Population Sciences, Mumbai, youth in rural areas were also more likely than those in urban areas to have initiated a pre-marital romantic relationship at age 15 (29% compared to 17% among young men, and 46% compared to 31% among young women).

Around 6% of rural youth compared to 1% of urban youth had their sexual debut before age 18.

Over 26% of young men and 40% of young women reported that they had spent time alone with their first romantic partner at age 15 or below.

Labels: India, premarital sex

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In a crowded courtroom on the city's outskirts, the once unthinkable is reality: dozens of couples -- rich and poor, educated and barely literate -- seek divorce for reasons as varied as domestic violence to a simple inability to live together.

Just a decade ago, divorce was a dirty word in socially conservative India. The fear of social isolation, a sense of duty to extended families -- who likely arranged the marriage in the first place -- and financial dependence put nearly unbearable pressure on couples to stay together.

But as the economy has boomed, the rigid boundaries governing traditional Indian life are beginning to fall, especially among the growing urban middle class. Dating among twentysomethings is growing popular, love matches (as opposed to arranged marriages) don't provoke the family scandals they once did and divorce is no longer out of bounds.

"All of a sudden it seems everyone I know is getting divorced," says 28-year-old Mohit Dutt, who last year filed for divorce from his wife of six years after "exhausting every possible way to save the marriage." ...

In the 1980s, New Delhi had two courts that dealt with divorce. Today there are 16. A new Indian matchmaking website Secondshaadi.com, or second marriage, now targets divorcees and widowers. A search on it throws up thousands of divorcees, most in the 25-to-35 age bracket. ...

Perhaps in response to such social churn, the federal government is considering a law that allows couples to end their marriage citing "irretrievable breakdown." While it's not clear when or if Parliament will pass the legislation, it's a definite breakaway from the current, more stringent, divorce laws, guided by religious family law.

Labels: divorce, economics, India, no-fault divorce

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Sugandha is conducting a session on raising awareness about the perils of child marriage among a group of schoolgirls. They listen with rapt attention to the didi (elder sister) they all admire. Sugandha came back to school after being married and then thrown out of her in-laws' home when her first-born died.

"Right now I work as a peer educator for a programme called Youth for Change. We arrange meetings and inform people about the ill effects of early marriages. Moreover, we have been successful in stopping a few child marriages," she says proudly.

Sugandha lives in Uttar Pradesh – one of the largest states in India – where 40% of girls are married before the age of 18, according to the District Level Household and Facility Survey – 3. Uttar Pradesh is among the top five states in India when it comes to rates of child marriage. Development indicators are among the lowest, and poverty, gender discrimination and migration have a big impact on child marriage and on the health of girls and young women.

Many rationalisations are made for marrying girls young, even though the marriage of those under 18 has been illegal since 1929, ie since the era of the British rule in India.

Labels: child marriage, India

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Trends are changing in the great Indian wedding bazaar. Gone is the rebelliousness of the 1980s and the 1990s, when the young and carefree defied parents to follow their heart to the altar.

In place is a thread of reason and unanimity with family over choice of lifemates, says Anupam Mittal, CEO of the country's largest matrimonial site shaadi.com .

"I remember there was this big rebellious streak in the eighties when kids wanted to marry outside the family and community. While the families wanted to choose, children wanted to follow their hearts," Mittal, often hailed as one of the world's most successful matchmakers, told us in an interview.

But in the last few years, eligible youngsters and their families are not at loggerheads over weddings any more, said Mittal.

"The trend among the young and eligible is 'I would like to exercise my choice as long as my parents are happy'. The realisation that ultimately it is also as much the family's choice as those tying the knot is dawning. People are waking up to the fact that marriage is much more than simply falling in love," Mittal said.

Last week, shaadi.com was recognised as one of the most innovative companies of 2011 by Fast Company, US, one of the the world's leading progressive business media branding platforms. Shaadi.com , which ranked 39 worldwide, was the only Indian company to make it to the list, Mittal said. ...

Citing another trend, Mittal said: "Nearly 30 years ago, the emphasis in matchmaking for a girl was a well-settled man.

"The man's family looked for an 'innocent' girl. The 1970s was dominated by the idea of a fair, innocent girl. Nearly 12 years ago, it changed a bit. The emphasis was on height and physicality. Innocence was replaced by good family background - good upbringing," Mittal said.

Labels: India, Marriage

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Bishnu Prasad Shrestha (35) of Baidam in Pokhara was returning home after 17 years of service at Ranchi-based 7/8 Gorkha Regiment in the Indian state of Jharkhanda on September 2, 2010 following his retirement.

All of a sudden, the Mourya Express Rail on which he was travelling ground to a halt at Chitaranjan forest in West Bengal at midnight. Taking advantage, a group of 40 robbers brandishing swords and knives got on board the train and began robbing the passengers. Bishnu too was forced to hand over everything he had to the looters. After the miscreants robbed the passengers, they turned their gaze on a 29-year-old woman sitting in the same apartment in the train.

Initially, they tried to force her to take off her clothes. Upon her refusal, they tried to rape her in front of her father’s eyes. She pleaded Bishnu to intervene and save her life to which Bishnu responded. He drew out a knife and stabbed three of the robbers to death to the sight of which rest of the looters fled the scene.

Thus, the life of the lady, a medical student, was saved while Bishnu sustained injuries on his left hand and had to remain in hospital for one month.

Labels: India, men, sexual assault, women

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The other day I watched two friends, both Indian, get married in a beautiful garden in Santa Cruz. One is Christian, the other Hindu, so they had two ceremonies. There was a three-tiered wedding cake and a sacred fire. But the really amazing part of the ceremony was that one of their fathers had flown in from India to bless them. It was amazing because my friends are both men. ...

One friend said that when an unmarried Chinese friend told his parents that at least he wasn't gay, they retorted, "We'd rather you were gay with kids."

When I left India for America, my aunts worried about who I might end up marrying. "I hope it's another Bengali," one told me. Over the years, that relaxed to, "I hope she's a Hindu." Then it became, "At least another Indian," until finally we reached, "I hope you'll get married before we all die." ...

In fact, I can imagine this ad in the local Indian weekly:

"Hindu very well-established Los Angeles family invites professional match for daughter, 25, 5-foot-3, slim, fair complexion, U.S. born, senior executive in Fortune 500 company. Loves music and dancing. Prospective lesbians encouraged to reply in confidence with complete bio data and returnable photo. Must be professional, under 30, caste no bar."

It might just be time for the gay arranged marriage.

Labels: arranged marriage, culture, gay marriage, India, Marriage

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The other day I watched two friends, both Indian, get married in a beautiful garden in Santa Cruz. One is Christian, the other Hindu, so they had two ceremonies. There was a three-tiered wedding cake and a sacred fire. But the really amazing part of the ceremony was that one of their fathers had flown in from India to bless them. It was amazing because my friends are both men. ...

One friend said that when an unmarried Chinese friend told his parents that at least he wasn't gay, they retorted, "We'd rather you were gay with kids."

When I left India for America, my aunts worried about who I might end up marrying. "I hope it's another Bengali," one told me. Over the years, that relaxed to, "I hope she's a Hindu." Then it became, "At least another Indian," until finally we reached, "I hope you'll get married before we all die." ...

In fact, I can imagine this ad in the local Indian weekly:

"Hindu very well-established Los Angeles family invites professional match for daughter, 25, 5-foot-3, slim, fair complexion, U.S. born, senior executive in Fortune 500 company. Loves music and dancing. Prospective lesbians encouraged to reply in confidence with complete bio data and returnable photo. Must be professional, under 30, caste no bar."

It might just be time for the gay arranged marriage.

Labels: arranged marriage, culture, gay marriage, India, Marriage

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Having emerged as the hottest destination for surrogacy, it is but natural for India to take the lead in evolving a law that safeguards the interests of all the parties concerned, including the child born through assisted reproductive technology (ART).

There is no precedent to the proposal under consideration that foreigners or NRIs seeking to rent a womb in India be made to give evidence that their country of residence recognized surrogacy and would give citizenship to a child born through agreement.

Both conditions are reasonable as they are designed to deal with the legal uncertainties thrown up by a couple of surrogacy cases that did not pan out in the agreed manner. In the Manji Yamada case, the baby was embroiled in litigation as the commissioning Japanese parents had divorced by the time it was born in India.

Labels: donor conception, India, surrogate motherhood

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On most measures of the strength of a community’s social fabric, the town of Oakdale would score poorly. There’s the high divorce rate and appallingly low incidence of marital fidelity, the off-the-charts frequency of assault, murder, rape, and arson; the overlapping epidemics of kidnapping, identity theft, fraud, and wedding-day bridal abandonment. And there is a local justice system seemingly bent on imprisoning the innocent, leaving it up to intrepid family members and lovers to bring the truth to light.

Thankfully, no one lives in Oakdale, no one real. It is the fictional town where ”As the World Turns,” America’s longest-running current soap opera, has tumultuously unfolded for over half a century (this season will be its last). And while the Gomorrhic dysfunction of places like the fictionalized Oakdale, Ill., or Port Charles, N.Y. (”General Hospital”) or Pine Valley, Pa. (”All My Children”) is what makes them so entertaining to their loyal fans, few would describe these as places where people live exemplary lives. Soap operas, after all, are entertainment at its least believable and least nutritious.

The possibility, therefore, that people might be modeling themselves after characters on soaps might seem both farfetched and frightening. A spate of recent research, however, suggests that, all over the world, that’s exactly what’s happening. What’s more, we should be happy about it.

Soaps, it turns out, are shaping behavior in ways that are subtle, profound and, from the standpoint of global development experts, positive. A team of economists credits Brazilian TV ”novelas” for helping to dramatically lower a fertility rate that in 1960 was above six births per woman. Others have found that in India — where soaps dominate the airwaves — villages where people watch more TV give more responsibilities and rights to women and girls. Researchers in Rwanda have found that radio soap operas there can help defuse the country’s dangerous ethnic tensions. Turkish soap operas have set off a public debate about women’s roles in the Middle East. And research in the United States has found that health tips tucked into soaps have greater sticking power than with just about any other mode of transmission. In a surprising number of ways, soap operas are improving lives around the world.

”The evidence we have from these academic studies is that quite often [viewers] take away different attitudes toward things like how many children they want, what is acceptable behavior for a husband toward his wife, what is the breakdown in a household of responsibilities over things like finances, should we be sending girls to school,” says Charles Kenny, an economist at the World Bank who has written about global television habits, and the author of a forthcoming book on development. ”All of these seem to be generated by watching some soap operas.”

Labels: Africa, Brazil, culture, feminism, gender, India, Marriage, Turkey, women

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More than 1,000 followers of a multi-religious sect in northern India have pledged to marry female sex workers who want to escape exploitation.

Young Hindu, Muslim and Sikh men have been queuing up at the Dera Sacha Sauda (Abode of the Real Deal) in the town of Sirsa as "wedding volunteers".

They say they are doing so to stop the women from being exploited in brothels.

They also claim that their move is part of a campaign to stop the spread of the HIV/Aids virus.

The Dera Sacha Sauda (DSS) is one of many religious sects operating in northern India.

Most take root by offering community services, social welfare and spiritual leadership but over time, as their followings grow, they often seek political influence.

Correspondents say that in religious terms, the DSS is hard to classify. Many experts argue that it is not, as some have said, an offshoot of Sikhism.

More than 1,200 DSS members have signed pledges to marry the sex workers following a call from DSS chief Ram Rahim Singh a little over a month ago.

Mr Singh commands a huge following of predominantly lower caste Hindus, Muslims and Sikhs across the states of Punjab, Haryana, Uttar Pradesh and Rajasthan.

Labels: Hinduism, India, Islam, Marriage, poverty, prostitution, religion, Sikhism

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Amidst all the high-level news about terrorism, the internal war in Swat Valley, and various military/foreign-policy questions, other topics in the news sometimes get overlooked.

To wit, Basim Usmani has an informative column up at Comment is Free on a recent ruling by Pakistan’s recently re-constituted Supreme Court, regarding Hijras:

Pakistan’s supreme court recently ruled that all hijras, the Urdu catch-all term for its transvestite, transgender and eunuch community, will be registered by the government as part of a survey that aims to integrate them further into society. The ruling followed a petition by Islamic jurist Dr Mohammad Aslam Khaki, who said the purpose was to “save them from a life of shame”.Khaki’s petition was prompted by a police raid on a hijra colony in Taxila, an ancient city filled with some of the oldest Buddhist ruins in Pakistan. Two of the three judges on the bench that ruled in favour if the hijra petition, chief justice Iftikhar Muhammad Chaudhry and Ijaz Ahmad Chaudhry, were under house arrest for
the better part of the past three years. This, coupled with the clobbering the police gave the lawyers during their demonstrations against the suspension of the judiciary in 2007, makes it easy to regard the hijra ruling as being directed against the police. (link)

...It’s intriguing to me that until just a couple of weeks ago, homosexuality was a crime under Section 377 in India; meanwhile transgendered individuals had, for at least a short while before that old law was overturned, a level of official recognition that few other countries could match. The disparity is of course understandable — Hijras are an endemic part of South Asian culture, while the concept of homosexuality is only recently gaining visibility. Still: does anyone know whether transgender or intergender individuals in any western countries have the equivalent of an “E” (or better, “T”) designation?

Labels: culture, hijra, homosexuality, India, Pakistan, transgender issues

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...My wife and I now have two sons who are both less than 10 years old. Sameera is relentless in asking them to pick up after themselves and help around the house. Recently, she confronted me on my slovenly habits. “You are setting them a bad example,” she said. “If they don’t see you doing any work in the house, they will never take my words seriously.”

It is true that I don’t help much in the house. Not, I am fairly certain, out of any male chauvinistic tendencies but out of simple laziness and my greater capacity to overlook dirty socks and strewn cushions than my wife. “Why get stressed about it?” I said. “They will learn to clean their houses when they need to.”

“You were lucky,” my wife said. “Your parents found a bride for you without you having to lift a finger. My sons won’t have that luxury. They have to find girls on their own, and they will find it difficult to attract good women if they don’t have clean homes.”

My poor sons. How the world has changed. Their mother teaches them to cook and vacuum the house so they can get wives. My mother found me a wife so I wouldn’t have to cook and clean. On the other hand, they, unlike me, will (I hope) have many girlfriends through their teenage years and play the field through their 20s before they each settle down with a wonderful woman.

Most American couples know a lot about each other before they tie the knot. They’ve been on dates, fallen in love, fought, made up, had sex and, most probably, even lived together before going down the aisle.

Our story, of course, is different. That 45-minute meeting was our only contact before we were husband and wife. We went to movies and the beach, fought over important and trivial things, made up and fell in love — all after our wedding.

“How could you marry somebody you did not know?” is a common question that many people have asked us in the West.

The slow discovery of another person and the unraveling of layers of mystery are part of the fun of arranged marriage. This has to be true of all marriages — the husband of five years is not the caring bridegroom, and the mother of a cranky 2-year-old is not the ecstatic bride.

Labels: arranged marriage, India, Marriage

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