The Price of Everything - Eduardo Porter [50]
For poor Indian families this can be costly, however. That’s why they often cull female fetuses to get rid of the problem before they reach the age of marriage.
KILLING GIRLS
Consider the Punjab and Haryana in northwestern India. According to India’s 1981 census, there were about 108 boys aged six or less for every 100 girls, already a lopsided ratio. Then ultrasound technology spread through the country, allowing parents to determine early the gender of their expected baby. Selective abortions surged. By 2001, the census reported that for each batch of 100 young girls there were 124 young boys.
Dowries no doubt are an important reason why women are such a burden to their families. But they are not the only reason families in South and East Asia try to unburden themselves of their daughters. In South Korea, marrying off a son is often much more expensive than marrying a daughter. Still, in South Korea, the 2000 census reported a ratio of 110 boys for every 100 girls four years old and younger, a ratio that suggests systematic culling of females—either just before birth or quickly afterward. According to one study, there were 61 to 94 girls “missing” in China for every 1,000 born in 1989- 90, and 70 missing girls in South Korea in 1992.
It might all be about supply and demand. In polygamous cultures—for example, among Kenya’s Kipsigis—available women are scarce commodities because rich men hoard them, making them valuable. In India, they do not have the benefit of scarcity.
Monica Das Gupta, a demographer at the World Bank, believes bride prices were common in northwestern India at the turn of the twentieth century. Dowries emerged as declining child mortality boosted population growth and tipped the mating balance in favor of men—who marry older. Today, she told me, the trend is reversing as declining population growth and prenatal culling of female fetuses have reduced the number of young girls for older men to marry. Parents in the Punjab these days scour other Indian regions offering money for brides to marry their sons.
Demand for women is also lower in patriarchal cultures in which male descendants are meant to carry the family line. The killing of girls in South and East Asia has increased not only because of advanced ultrasound technology but also because falling fertility has reduced the size of families and families still want at least one son.
Researchers argue that girls are cheap in the patriarchal systems of South and East Asia because they are excised from their birth families, transplanted forever to those of their husbands. They are useless to pass the lineage down and provide no economic support to their parents. Women are not part of the clan. Men make up the social order; women are brought in to help men reproduce. They must bear a son. Otherwise they have no point.
Some of these biases were codified in law. South Korea’s Family Law of 1958 said inheritance should go down the male line, men must marry outside their lineage, and wives must be transferred to their husband’s family register. The kids, of course, belonged to the father’s line. Only in 2005 did the Supreme Court mandate that women could remain on the register of their parents after marriage. In 2008 parents were allowed to register the children under the mother’s family name.
These practices survive even outside their social and economic context. A study of the 2000 census in the United States found similar lopsided sex ratios in the children of Chinese, Indian, and South Korean parents. Among third children, sons outnumbered daughters by 50 percent if the family already had two girls.
But even in South and East Asia, there is hope that demographic and economic changes could raise the value of women. Industrial development in South Korea has reduced the importance of the family at the center