China's birth limits create dangerous gender gap

[Mme. Defarge]

Source: AP

BEIJING – China has 32 million more young men than young women — a gender gap that could lead to increasing crime — because parents facing strict birth limits abort female fetuses to have a son, a study released Friday said.

The imbalance is expected to steadily worsen among people of childbearing age over the next two decades and could trigger a slew of social problems, including a possible spike in crime by young men unable to find female partners, said an author of the report published in the BMJ, formerly known as the British Medical Journal.

The study said analysis of China's 2005 census data extrapolated that males under age 20 exceeded their female counterparts by a whopping 32 million.

The study found that China has 119 male births for every 100 girls, compared with 107 to 100 for industrialized countries.

The prevalence of sonograms in recent years has allowed parents to learn the gender of their fetus about 20 weeks into pregnancy, Hesketh said, leading to a rise in abortions based on sex. Abortion is legal and widely available.



Read more: http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20090410/ap_on_re_as/as_chin...

[MADem]

1. All them wimmen are.....over here!!! The ones that weren't aborted, anyway.

How many male adopted Chinese babies have you seen?

I've not seen a single one. It's only the girlbabies that are "disposable."

Same shit happens in India, too. As a consequence, women of "lower caste" (what a stupid concept) are able to move on up to the East Side, because there just aren't enough women of the "right" caste to go around.

[pansypoo53219]

5. indeed.

tho my uncle has a chinese girl and a boy. but it is rare.

[MADem]

11. Wow. Your uncle is the first I've EVER heard to have adopted a male child.

I live in a town with a fair number of rich and older parents with adopted kids...and not one Chinese male! Lotta females, though!

[MissB]

36. Some friends of mine recently adopted a boy from China.

He had a cleft issue which was easily taken care of once they returned to the States.

[LibertyLover]

7. That's because the Chinese rarely make males available for

adoption. It is the rare family who will abandon a male child in China. About the only time it happens is if that child is disabled, either physically or mentally. Our adoption agency told us that in all the years they had been facilitating adoptions from China they had had fewer than 20 boys offered to them for placement. And most of those boys all had physical problems like mitral stenosis and clift palate. Things that are fixable here, but not in China for the children of the poor - one reason they were abandoned. The other boys, mainly the ones with mental disabilities or severe physical problems, are kept in the orphanages and not put on the list of adoptable children. I know some families who begged and pleaded with Chinese adoption officials to be permitted to adopt a special needs boy and who were turned down because it was deemed not to be in the best interests of China.

[DollyM]

27. I know one . . .

Many years ago, a family I knew had a daughter by birth and was told that they shouldn't try again due to the mother's health so they adopted a baby boy from China. Of course, this was before the one child rule so there may have been more males available then. They wanted a boy to complete thier family and it was easier to adopt a chinese baby boy than an American one.

[Just-plain-Kathy]

2. According to Alex Jone's The End Game, it was papa Bush who fathered...

...China's population control policies.

[ProgressiveProfessor]

3. Which is of course total nonsense.

[Reterr]

4. Absolutely-Alex Jones doesn't do anything but total horseshit

[ProgressiveProfessor]

12. He was clearly wrong about this one

[Just-plain-Kathy]

17. Not everything Alex Jones says is nonsense. n/t

[ProgressiveProfessor]

18. Never claimed it was...however, he is dead wrong on this point

[MADem]

8. That's as silly as saying he father ed Yao Ming!

And of course, Yao plays for Houston to be near his family!!!

[On the Road]

China's Population Control Policies

go farther back than Bush Sr's stint as liaison to China.

In 1956, China started a campaign to limit population growth to 2% a year through various measures including birth control.

In 1971, a policy limited urban couples to two children and prevented rural women from marrying until they were 23.

The current one-child policy was introduced in the late 1970s. There are many exceptions to the one-child policy, including:

- Ethnic minorities such as the Man, Mongols, Tibetans, or Uighurs
- Rural couples in some areas who have a girl as their first child
- Children who are not Chinese citizens
- Multiple births
- Children born with a physical or mental disability
- In Henan, a couple who are both only children can have a second child

The policy was intended to be in force for a generation, although it has been extended.

[On the Road]

20. delete -- double post

[Lydia Leftcoast]

6. Yes, all those couples have their precious sons...

who won't be able to find wives.

Karma in action.

[No Elephants]

34. Not my understanding of how karma works. The boys who were born had no choice in the

matter and their parents have spouses.

[Lydia Leftcoast]

35. The karma is that while the parents themselves will have someone to

take care of them in their old age, they'll never have grandchildren, and their son will have no one in his old age.

[IDFbunny]

9. If I were a propective Chinese parent I would choose a girl

and demand a big dowry for marrying her off well. Economics sez if there are too few young ladies that their worth will go up. A surplus of young men means their worth goes down.

Don't girls also get their inheritance or are they gyped somehow.

Countries with to many young boys typically send them off to war.

[XemaSab]

16. Boys take care of their parents in old age

Girls take care of their husband's parents.

Ergo, if you have a girl you will have nobody to take care of you when you are old.

[SharonAnn]

32. Though gangs of men can kidnap women, and probably would.

Though the women would be more rare, that doesn't mean they have more power.

And most violence in the world is created by young men.

[truthisfreedom]

10. These are the computer nerds with far too much time on their hands hacking into our

networks.

[wuushew]

13. How is something over 30 years in the making breaking news?

Lets check back in 15-20 years when this article speculates there will be a massive crime explosion, otherwise it is needless male bashing.

[Bearware]

14. The classical way to deal with too many excess males is war

1. This doesn't get a great deal of attention but China will soon have roughly 20 million excess males of military age.

2. China has so much of the worlds manufacturing infrastructure that they would not have a lot of trouble equipping that 20 million as infantry.

3. China has intercontinental nuclear weapons delivery capability as well as rapidly improving conventional air force and air defense capability. Any conflict with China would not be a repeat of Korea where many soldiers didn't have weapons.

1 + 2 + 3 = Every country in Asia, with a few exceptions, is likely to be invaded as the economic chaos deepens and more social unrest develops in China. The few exceptions probably include Japan, Russia, Ukraine, India, Pakistan and maybe some others. Even with some atomic bombs and shorter range delivery options, India and Pakistan are by no means safe.

How far can Asian countries go in assuming that the U.S. nuclear umbrella will be used to protect them when the U.S. would be under direct nuclear threat.

Even if China only goes after a few countries, the rest will fall in line out of fear.

[Romulox]

21. I agree. War is inevitable. nt

[Xithras]

22. If China invades anything, it will be Siberia.

Mongolia will fall simply because it's in the way and China claims it anyway (like Tibet), but the real prize is Siberia. Endless natural resources, oil, gas, fresh water, fertile land, and very few people.

[shanti]

15. just goes to show

it's not nice to fool with mother nature!

[MisterP]

19. um, asymptotic population explosion IS fooling with nature n/t

[robinlynne]

23. same thing is happening in India, with no birth control policies. The result is

kidnapping of women to become forced wives, sale of girls....

[smiley_glad_hands]

24. There is only one need for such an imbalance.

War.

[LaurenG]

25. Well when governments interfere with choice they create imbalance

So it looks like Chinese men will have to find wives outside of their own country. I guess the government won't be able to encourage the population to remain within the country for partners and China will change. That will might be a good thing.

[Deja Q]

26. Sexism is vulgar, I'm sorry they feel otherwise.

How's homosexuality treated, what with that extrapolation and all? (1.4 billion people, and if the males exceed females by only 32 million, what's really to whine about? Or do they mean 32 million males to 1 female? )

[rollingrock]

28. They can all become gay. Problem solved.

homosexuality is a choice, after all.

[GinaMaria]

29. Smells like War

Old (and generally powerful) men make war and young men make love. Sadly, those old ones who make war, send the young ones to do their dirty work. And why not? Surplus males with no partners or hope of a partner? Draft them! Some trumped up threat will be manufactured and tap into their frustration. Many will die. That will thin the herd.

Now who will they go to war with?

[demigoddess]

30. why don't they just allow two men to marry one woman. It would lower the

birth rate further and allowing all the women to have two babies would allow for greater gender balance.

[Nay]

31. Because the woman would be worked to death. nt

[No Elephants]

33. Title incorrect. The birth limits, while an intrusion on individual rights,

are not responsible for the gender gap. The choices of the parents are responsible for the gender gap. And the choices of the parents reflect a near global, age old, social preference for males over females.

Blaming that on China alone is like blaming on the bossa nova.

[JeanGrey]

37. This is WHY governments should butt out of family

planning issues.