Women's Rights?

I have always thought it ironic that most women's rights advocates are so liberal.  They are generally opposed to most aspects of the War on Terror and efforts to combat Islamist extremists.  This is despite the fact that these Islamic extremists provide almost no rights to women.  In Saudi Arabia, women are not even allowed to drive.  It is as if they cannot see the forest for the trees.

A similar discordance can be found in the ardent pro-choice views of liberal women and what is occurring across the globe with unfettered choice on abortion.  PowerLine  references the book review "War on Girls" in the Wall Street Journal by Jonathan V. Last of Unnatural Selection: Choosing Boys Over Girls, and the Consequences of a World Full of Men by Mara Hvistendahl.

Here is Mr. Last's summary of some of the key points in Hvistendahl's book.

In China, India and numerous other countries (both developing and developed), there are many more men than women, the result of systematic campaigns against baby girls. In "Unnatural Selection," Ms. Hvistendahl reports on this gender imbalance: what it is, how it came to be and what it means for the future.

In nature, 105 boys are born for every 100 girls. This ratio is biologically ironclad. Between 104 and 106 is the normal range, and that's as far as the natural window goes. Any other number is the result of unnatural events.

Yet today in India there are 112 boys born for every 100 girls. In China, the number is 121--though plenty of Chinese towns are over the 150 mark. China's and India's populations are mammoth enough that their outlying sex ratios have skewed the global average to a biologically impossible 107. But the imbalance is not only in Asia. Azerbaijan stands at 115, Georgia at 118 and Armenia at 120.

What is causing the skewed ratio: abortion. If the male number in the sex ratio is above 106, it means that couples are having abortions when they find out the mother is carrying a girl. By Ms. Hvistendahl's counting, there have been so many sex-selective abortions in the past three decades that 163 million girls, who by biological averages should have been born, are missing from the world. Moral horror aside, this is likely to be of very large consequence.

Let that last stat sink in.  Due to sex-selective abortions in the world over the last 3 decades there are 163 million females missing that should have been born!  I don't think you could have a much bigger women's rights issue than that!

Beyond the issue of abortion rights, you also have the issue of what becomes of a society that is so unbalanced between males and females.

Ms. Hvistendahl argues that such imbalances are portents of Very Bad Things to come. "Historically, societies in which men substantially outnumber women are not nice places to live," she writes. "Often they are unstable. Sometimes they are violent." As examples she notes that high sex ratios were at play as far back as the fourth century B.C. in Athens—a particularly bloody time in Greek history—and during China's Taiping Rebellion in the mid-19th century. (Both eras featured widespread female infanticide.) She also notes that the dearth of women along the frontier in the American West probably had a lot to do with its being wild. In 1870, for instance, the sex ratio west of the Mississippi was 125 to 100. In California it was 166 to 100. In Nevada it was 320. In western Kansas, it was 768.

There is indeed compelling evidence of a link between sex ratios and violence. High sex ratios mean that a society is going to have "surplus men"—that is, men with no hope of marrying because there are not enough women. Such men accumulate in the lower classes, where risks of violence are already elevated. And unmarried men with limited incomes tend to make trouble. In Chinese provinces where the sex ratio has spiked, a crime wave has followed. Today in India, the best predictor of violence and crime for any given area is not income but sex ratio.

To give you some perspective of the issue, this chart shows the deficit of women compared to men in the  age 18-23 demographic.  There is about a 10 million deficit in China and 6.5 million deficit in India.

The larger demographic to the early 30's (the prime marrying years) indicates a 30 million deficit of women compared to men.  What do you do with 30 million excess males under the age of 30 in a population with no females to help keep them in line?  I can think of no better place than in an army.  That should give everyone some pause.  Even solidly liberal women's rights advocates.