For decades China’s “one child” policy has been the centerpiece of its population control efforts. Millions of young girls have been killed in their mothers’ wombs as an indirect consequence of this policy for a very simple reason: If parents can only have one child, the majority prefer that child to be a boy. Therefore, when many parents find out their unborn child is a girl they have her killed.
China has sown the wind. Now it is time to reap the whirlwind. This story is about the large and growing gender gap in China. The Chinese have killed a large slice of an entire generation of women, and as a result in a few years 30 million men are going to be unable to find wives. One can only imagine the social disruption this will cause, and we are kidding ourselves if we think that disruption will be contained in China.
Note also the subtle lie in the article: “Because of China’s one child policy to control its ever expanding population — now numbering 1.3 billion people — there has been a lopsided explosion of young boys.” Yes, the policy is the indirect cause of the disproportionate rate of male births. But we can be sure that girls and boys are conceived at the same rate in China as they are everywhere else in the world, very close to one-to-one. The policy is neutral concerning gender. In practice, however, parents decide to kill their unborn girls and not their unborn boys, and it is that practice, not the policy per se, that has caused the gender gap.