I was looking through the news this morning and spotted a headline in the Dong-A Ilbo suggesting that the gender imbalance in Asia was due to American anti-communist policy.
The headline on the front page of Naver.com was even more dramatic: “Where Have All the Girls Gone? Is Korea’s Becoming an Abortion Paradise America’s Fault?”
Chrikey, I said. My attention fully gotten, I clicked over and found the story was about a recent piece in Foreign Policy by Science‘s Beijing correspondent Mara Hvistendahl entitled, “Where Have All the Girls Gone? It’s true: Western money and advice really did help fuel the explosion of sex selection in Asia.” It’s an interesting piece, and I think one that, like the film “Children of Men,” is blessed with stuff about which both left-wingers and right-wingers can get their hate-on.:
The story begins in the mid-20th century, when several factors converged to make Western demographers worried about global population growth. Thanks to advances in public health, people were living longer than ever before. Projections released by the U.N. Population Division in 1951 suggested what the sum of all those extra years of life could be: Rapid population growth was on the horizon, particularly in the developing world. As pundits forecast a global “population explosion,” anxiety mounted in policy circles, and the population control movement that coalesced brought together everyone from environmentalists to McCarthyites. Viewed through a 1960s Beltway lens, mounting numbers of people meant higher rates of poverty, which in turn made countries more vulnerable to communism.
Ah, the days when we all thought civilization would end because of overpopulation, nuclear war or AIDS. Good times, good times.
What readers here will find most interesting is the example of South Korea, which she cites in great detail. Frankly, this is quite shocking:
In South Korea, Western money enabled the creation of a fleet of mobile clinics — reconditioned U.S. Army ambulances donated by USAID and staffed by poorly trained workers and volunteers. Fieldworkers employed by the health ministry’s Bureau of Public Health were paid based on how many people they brought in for sterilizations and intrauterine device insertions, and some allege Korea’s mobile clinics later became the site of abortions as well. By the 1970s, recalls gynecologist Cho Young-youl, who was a medical student at the time, “there were agents going around the countryside to small towns and bringing women into the [mobile] clinics. That counted toward their pay. They brought the women regardless of whether they were pregnant.” Non-pregnant women were sterilized. A pregnant woman met a worse fate, Cho says: “The agent would have her abort and then undergo tubal ligation.” As Korea’s abortion rate skyrocketed, Sung-bong Hong and Christopher Tietze detailed its rise in the Population Council journal Studies in Family Planning. By 1977, they determined, doctors in Seoul were performing 2.75 abortions for every birth — the highest documented abortion rate in human history. Were it not for this history, Korean sociologist Heeran Chun recently told me, “I don’t think sex-selective abortion would have become so popular.”
If you’ve been to the Korean countryside, the impact of sex-selection, plunging birth rates — for some time, Korea has had one of the lowest birth rates in the world — and internal migration is easy to see. Villages are dying off, and town have taken to subsidizing the importing of foreign women as wives, which not only leads to social problems in the villages themselves, but also adds a previously absent ethnic component to the already sizable economic, social and cultural gap between rural and urban areas.
Anyway, check out the rest of Hvistendahl’s piece on your own.
{ 11 comments… read them below or add one }
Hvistendahl’s piece is full of interesting information, but its arguments regarding the purported dispositive causal relationships between the birth control measures promoted by Western aid agencies in Asia and rural depopulation in South Korea and sex selective abortion are codswallop.
You know, one side effect of trying to blame all of Korea’s social problems on the US is that the implication is made that the US basically owns Korea. Apparently we can make their country stay divided for 50 years artificially, dump our chemical waste all over the place, poison them with old, mad cow disease beef, kill off all their women, and force them into economic crisis (in 1998) and there’s nothing they can do about it. Oh woe are they, eternal victims, always suffering at the hands of their omnipotent taskmasters, the US.
You are oversimplifying things and failing to read in between the lines. Plus, it seems you are believing all the old western tabloid propaganda and stereotypes about Asia, that are plain ridiculous.
For starters, Korea’s low birth rate — lowest in the OECD — should be acknowledged as the main culprit for a shortage of not only females but also males in the general population. This has affected not only urban areas but also rural areas that have been losing BOTH young women and young men to the cities. (Actually, Korea overall has an oversupply of young, unmarried women in the 18-40 range — which is quite obvious if you live in the cities — and is quite striking compared to Western Europe and the U.S., where most women of the same age range are either attached or married.)
That said, the problem is not “selective abortion” but rather rural-to-urban youth migration. And the mass exodus of young people — both young women and men — is not just a Korean problem, it’s a global problem too. (Ever visit the Japanese countryside? Or how about small towns in Italy, Germany, France, etc., or the American Rustbelt for that matter? Where are the young girls — and young boys — there, or is it all really about “selective abortion”?)
The 18-40 demographic– to include young couples — have been fleeing the countryside for better lives in the cities in practically every country in the industrialized world, whether it be for better education, better jobs, or better opportunities elsewhere for decades.
I’ve oft heard of this bogus argument that Korea has an alleged shortage of women due to selective abortion, but anyone whose spent any amount of time in Korea knows this is bullshit. Yes, young Korean women — as well as young men — can no longer can be found in the villages in any great numbers. But is this really b/c of years of selective abortion? Regardless of what the western media says, Korea actually has a surplus of young women in the 18-40 demographic.
And if you still can’t find young, marriageable= age Korean women in the rural areas, it’s hardly due to “selective abortion”, but rather due to the simple fact that Korean young people nowadays — and for the past few decades — do not think toiling as a farmer or farmer’s wife for the rest of their lives is an attractive way of life.
However, for those diehard Korean farmers who’ve believed all the Confucian adages about the virtues of farmers all these years, well they’re not going anywhere, so who are they going to marry? For them, “importing” brides from SE Asia is the only alternative.
Is there going to be some culture clash and misunderstanding in the beginning as foreign wives try to adapt themselves to living in Korea? Of course there will be. But people are invariably adaptable, and I would hardly classify this trend as a “social problem”, as we’re not talking about criminal behavior or violations of the law. Rather, these are cross-cultural issues that are going to require sensitivity, time and understanding in order to figure out.
I cited three factors: sex selection, declining birth rates and internal migration. Sorry for oversimplifying.
As for sex selection and selective abortions being bullshit and/or products of the Western media’s imagination, I bring you:
http://media.daum.net/society/others/view.html?cateid=1067&newsid=20110607142036058&p=fnnewsi
http://www.ohmynews.com/NWS_Web/View/at_pg.aspx?CNTN_CD=A0000876608
http://english.chosun.com/site/data/html_dir/2009/12/19/2009121900226.html
http://joongangdaily.joins.com/article/view.asp?aid=2889977
http://www.unfpa.org/gender/docs/studies/summaries/regional_analysis.pdf
If by codswallop, you mean playing up tenuous links to examples that support her point of view while skipping over counterexamples like Vietnam, then I would agree.
“Tenuous” is too kind. She provides no evidence whatsoever either of the intent of the nasty Westerners to promote sex selective birth control or of any actions taken by them to do so. All we get is the idiotic assertion by the quoted Korean sociologist to the effect that the promotion of birth control “must have” resulted in sex selection in Korea: i.e., the old Korean standby – it was “inevitable” or the (Western) devil made me do it. In regards to rural depopulation, again no evidence. Although it seems plausible that birth control played a role, as it clearly made a difference to reduced population figures generally, one has to consider the likely much greater impact of internal migration resulting from industrialization and the accompanying urbanization for the explanation of specifically “rural” depopulation – both large national policies that were also shaped in part by Western advice (who also promoted many more schemes for rural agricultural development) but were enthusiastically adopted and promoted by Koreans themselves, often to an extent that far exceeded the advice, e.g., the decisions to build the Seoul-Busan expressway, Pohang Steel and the launch the heavy industry/chemical drive.
Did the USA also influence China and India??
There are now seven million more boys than girls under six years of age in India due to sex selective abortions.
http://dok.do/KC1LbW
If the baby is born as a girl, the parents immediately have the baby/child have a sex change operation to be a [infertile] boy.
http://dok.do/JlSe33
Somehow, I just don’t find any logic in what Mara Hvistendahl wrote.
The US does “own” Korea and other places such as Europe, Japan, etc. in many respects. And it has a large influence and impact on those places.
Western measures and influence have had a role in affecting birth rates, both in the West and around the world.
Sorry to post here so late, but i just thought it worth noting that historically, too many men has led to too many wars…
Not if you make them eunuchs or monks/priests (spiritual castration)
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