Family Unbalancing

Posted by Pete Shanks June 16, 2009
Biopolitical Times

The New York Times has drawn attention, with a front-page and heavily emailed story, to evidence that Americans of Chinese, Indian and Korean descent have a statistically significant preference for male children. This does not show up in first-borns, but if the first child is female, it's more likely than chance would suggest that the second will be male. And if couples have two girls, the chances that the third will be a boy rise dramatically: by almost 50 percent.

Much of the article is based on a study by Douglas Almond and Lena Edlund published last year in PNAS. Jason Abrevaya published one in 2005 [pdf], suggesting the same, and another in April, which estimates that there were "over 2,000 'missing' Chinese and Indian girls in the United States between 1991 and 2004."

In China, of course, the overall number is enormously larger, with about 32 million more males than females under the age of 20, and the problem is worse. The overall ratio there at birth is 120:100, compared with an expected 105:100 (the biological norm). In the U.S., the ratio for first children of these cultural/ethnic groups is the norm, but for second children if the first was a girl it's 117:100. For the third child in the U.S., after two girls, it rises to 151:100, which is higher than in India (139:100) but much lower than in China, where the comparable ratio was 225:100 in the 1990 census.

In the U.S., as Almond and Edlund note, the overall effect on the population is small, because Indians, Chinese and Koreans make up less than 2% of the population. But the trend is worrying: They found it by examining 2000 census data, but the effect was "substantially muted" in the 1990 U.S. census, so the sex bias here appears to be recent. No explanation is offered, but it might be due to the increased availability of high-tech sex-selection technologies.

Some clinics openly advertise sex selection, and at least one such practitioner, Dr. Jeffrey Steinberg of the Fertility Institutes of Los Angeles, defends the practice by claiming that other ethnic or cultural groups (such as "Canadians") prefer girls. We are not aware of any studies demonstrating that effect in Canada, but the preference of certain groups in the U.S. for boys has now been statistically established.

There is an important underlying issue, as Sunita Puri has noted, of "what sex selection signifies -- the unequal status of women." In a recent survey, most primary care physicians with experience of sex selection "either witnessed or heard of immigrant women trying to have sons to avoid mistreatment or abandonment by their families." Beyond that, there are issues of control and expectation, no matter which sex is selected. Said one doctor, "To say that you want a child based on whether they are male or female is almost degrading."

The justification most often given for allowing sex selection -- illegal in many countries but not the U.S. -- is "family balancing," sometimes called "gender variety." Unfortunately, as these studies demonstrate, if couples in a particular culture have a strong preference for boys, they are more likely to "balance" if their first child is a girl, and much more likely if they have two girls. The net result (in that culture) is insufficient gender variety, and an unbalanced population.

Previously on Biopolitical Times: