Population and some thoughts on abortion.

 

A poster on the GPN board has for years regularly proclaimed the dire need for stringent population controls to solve the world's problems and over the past few days I've been making discoveries about the most famous case, China, with its rigorously and forcibly enforced one child per family law.

20 years ago ultrasound scanning came into widespread use in China and Asia generally and gave pregnant women a cheap and readily available means to discover the sex of their unborn foetus. The results, by the million, are now coming to maturity in Bangladesh, India, Taiwan and China. By choosing to abort females and give birth to males millions of Asian parents have propelled the region into a unique experiment in the social effects of gender imbalance.

As a result of foetal gender selection the natural (universal non-selective) balance of about 105 male births to 100 female has grown to around 120 male births for every 100 female births in China. The imbalance is even higher in some locales; 136 males to 100 females on the island of Hainan, an increasingly prosperous tourist resort, and 135 males to 100 females in central China’s Hubei Province. According to the China Family Planning Association Lianyungan, a booming port, has the most extreme gender ratio for children under four - 163 boys for every 100 girls.  There are currently 37 million more young men than young women in China. 

Similar patterns can be found in Taiwan, with 119 boys to 100 girls; Singapore, 118 boys to 100 girls; South Korea, 112 boys to 100 girls; and parts of India, 120 boys to 100 girls.

(China, India, and other nations have now outlawed the use of prenatal diagnostic techniques to select the sex of an unborn child but a suitably compensated ultrasound technician need only smile or frown at the expectant mother or father.)

Many of these excess boys will be and are poor and rootless, a lumpenproletariat without the consolations of marriage and family. Prostitution, sex tourism, and homosexuality may ease their unfulfilled urges, but Asian societies are witnessing far more dramatic solutions.  Chinese police statistics recorded 65,236 arrests for female trafficking in 1990–91 alone. Updated numbers are hard to come by, but it’s apparent that the problem remains severe.  Mass sexual frustration is thus adding a potent ingredient to an increasingly volatile Chinese mix of problems that include surging economic growth, urbanization, drug abuse, and environmental pollution.

Beijing expects that it may have as many as 40+ million frustrated bachelors by 2020. The regime, always nervous about social control, fears that they might generate social and political instability. What are the chances hmm? Well, China watchers are already seeing signs of growing criminality; over the past decade, as the (post ultrasound) boys have hit adolescence, the country's youth crime rate has more than doubled.

One might assume that China’s economic growth will solve the problem, as prosperity removes the traditional economic need for poor rural peasants to have sons who can work the land but the numbers don’t support that theory. Indeed, the steepest imbalance between male and female infants is found in the most prosperous regions, such as Hainan Island and Lianyungan.

The long-term implications of the gender imbalance are largely guesswork because there is no real precedent for imbalances on such a scale.  A Beijing powerstruggle between cautious old technocrats and aggressive young nationalists may be decided by mobs of rootless young men, demanding uniforms, rifles, and a chance to liberate Taiwan.  A study undertaken under the aegis of the CIA suggested “in 2020 it may seem to China that it would be worth it to have a very bloody battle in which a lot of their young men could die in some glorious cause.”

In contrast a study in the USA into criminality and specifically the sudden drop in crime rates in the 1990s suggested that the legalisation of abortion in 1973 was a key factor. By 1980 1.6 million abortions were carried out annually - almost 1 abortion to each 2 live births.

The smaller birth cohort resulting from the legalisation  of abortion means that when that cohort reaches the late teens and twenties, there will be fewer young males in their highest-crime years, and thus less crime.  As each year cohort reaches adolescence and adulthood and older cohorts mature beyond the most usual age for criminal behaviour (18 - 24) the crime rates will drop year on year - and that's what has happened in the USA ever since 1992 when the first post-Roe v Wade legalisation of abortion cohort reached the age of 18/19. 

 

As interesting is the possibility that children born since abortion became legal in the USA may on average have lower subsequent rates of criminality for either of two reasons. First, women who have abortions are those most at risk of raising children likely to engage in criminal activity; socially immature teenagers and the economically disadvantaged are all substantially more likely to abort and recent studies have found children born to these mothers to be at higher risk for committing crime in adolescence.

Secondly, the 5 states which legalised abortion in 1970,  before Roe v Wade saw drops in crime before the other 45 states.  States with higher rates of abortion have had a 30% drop in crime relative to low abortion-rate states since 1985.  The analysis and comparison of statistical data suggests that around 50% of the drop in US crime rate between 1991 and 1997 can be accounted fro by the legalisation of abortion: virtually all of the crime decrease can be attributed to reductions in crime among the cohort born after abortion was legalised - there is no change in crime amongst older cohorts born before Roe v Wade.

 

These research outcomes pointing as they do to particular conclusions pose some difficult ethical questions and I'd be very glad to have your considered comments.

 

Links to research available if required.  :O)