The Story: Because of China’s previous one-child policy, there are an estimated 30 million to 60 million “missing girls” (e.g., killed through abortion or infanticide). But a new study claims those numbers are likely overblown and that “a large number of those girls aren't missing at all—it was more of an administrative story that had to do with how births are registered at local levels in China.”
The Background: In an attempt to limit population growth, China implemented a policy in the late 1970s that prohibited families from having more than one child. The direct effect of the policy, according to China’s own family planners, has been the prevention of 400 million births (nearly the combined total population of the United States and Canada). Indirectly, the policy has lead to a massive imbalance in sex ratios, and a large number of girls that should be expected in the demographic data are “missing.”
Several years ago, in a speech before the United Nations, demographer Nicholas Eberstadt noted there is a “slight but constant and almost unvarying excess of baby boys over baby girls born in any population.” The number of baby boys born for every hundred baby girls—which is so constant that it can “qualify as a rule of nature”—falls along an extremely narrow range along the order of 103, 104, or 105. On rare occasions it even hovers around 106.
These sex ratios vary slightly based on ethnicity. For example, rates in the United States in 1984 were as follows: White: 105.4; Black: 103.1; American Indian: 101.4; Chinese: 104.6; and Japanese: 102.6. Such variations, however, remain small and fairly stable over time.
But Eberstadt found that during the last generation, the sex ratio at birth in some parts of the world—especially in China—have become “completely unhinged.” In a number of Chinese provinces—with populations of tens of millions of people—the reported sex ratio at birth ranges from 120 boys for every 100 girls to more than 130. Eberstadt notes that this is “a phenomenon utterly without natural precedent in human history.”
For decades scholars concluded the primary reason for the imbalance was a cultural preference for sons. Because Chinese families were allowed to have only one child, it was believed many would simply have an abortion if the expected child were a girl, thus keeping them from having to “waste” their quota on female children.
The number of these “missing girls” is often estimated to be between 25 million to 30 million, though in 2007 the British medical journal Lancet claimed the number could be as high as 50 million.
This new study co-authored by a Chinese and American researchers, however, claims it’s possible many of the missing girls have been “found.”
Because the one-child policy was carried out at the local level, local government officials may have been willing and able in the interest of social stability to “hide” the birth of girls from government records.
“We noticed that qualitatively when we interviewed villagers and higher- and lower-level officials everybody had a tacit understanding that yes, millions of girls and some boys, too, were allowed to be unregistered, and then these children appear in the population statistics as older cohorts at junior high school age and marriage age,” said John Kennedy, the American co-author of the study.
The researchers also examined Chinese population data by cohort and compared the number of children born in 1990 with the number of 20-year-old Chinese men and women in 2010. In that cohort, they discovered 4 million additional people, and of those there were approximately 1 million more women than men.
“If we go over a course of 25 years, it's possible there are about 25 million women in the statistics that weren't there at birth,” Kennedy added.
Why It Matters: On hearing of such findings there are two broad mistakes we can make. The first error occurs when we leap to interpret the conclusions of the study in a way that downplays the moral horror of sex-selective abortions in China. The second mistake is downplay the results of the study because it might lead some people to embrace the first error.
As Christians we should hope and pray that the conclusion is largely correct and that there truly are millions more Chinese women alive today than we had assumed. We should always want to be surprised by the discovery of God’s beneficence in the world, especially when it gives us reason to praise his providential care for children. If the political explanation is even partially true, we should rejoice and give thanks.
However, even if this study is correct there are still millions of babies—in China and throughout the world—who have been and are being killed because they are female.
Today, biologically impossible ratios have been found not only in China but also in various countries around the world, including Armenia, Austria, Azerbaijan, Cyprus, El Salvador, Egypt, Georgia, Greece, India, Italy, Libya, Macedonia, Malaysia, Pakistan, Portugal, Philippines, Republic of Korea, Spain, Taiwan, Tunisia, Yugoslavia, and Venezuela. It is even found in America, where rates of 108 boys to 100 girls have been found in populations from Asian-Pacific regions (Chinese Americans, Korean Americans, Filipino Americans, and so on)
Even if many of China’s “missing girls” have been found, the global war on baby girls continues. The solution to the problem is for cultures and countries to embrace the gospel so they will learn the intrinsic value and dignity of women.
“In the final analysis, mass female feticide is a matter of ‘demand’: no demand, no female feticide,” Eberstadt told TGC in 2012. “Ending this abomination will require a moral transformation in the societies currently scarred by the practice: nothing less than a struggle for the conscience of countries can be expected to turn the tide.”
