The San Jose Mercury News has an article highlighting some soon-to-be-published findings by economists at both Columbia University and the University of Texas who were studying Asian immigrant communities. The findings indicate that the practice of sex selection among Asian immigrants does not stop at American shores as many of us would like to believe:
Researchers are finding the first evidence that some Asian immigrant families are using U.S. medical technology to have sons instead of daughters, apparently acting on an age-old cultural prejudice that has led to high ratios of boys to girls in parts of China and India.
The new research, produced by independent teams of economists who arrived at similar conclusions, focused on Indian, Chinese and Korean families who first had girls and then used modern technology to have a son…For some South Asian couples, having a boy is a “status symbol,” said Deepka Lalwani of Milpitas, the founder and president of Indian Business & Professional Women, a nonprofit business support network. “If a woman has male children, she feels in her family, certainly with her in-laws, that her status will go up because now she is the mother of a male child…”
Such cultural pressures may explain the recent findings. A Columbia University study suggests that Chinese, Indian and Korean immigrants have been using medical technology, most likely including abortion, to assure their later children were boys. And a soon-to-be published analysis of birth records by a University of Texas economist estimates there were 2,000 “missing girls” between 1991 and 2004 among immigrant families from China and India living in the U.S. — children never born because their parents chose to have sons instead. [Link]
Perhaps I’ve just been very naive but I was quite surprised by this finding. Given that the prime reason for preferring sons in Asian countries is that sons serve as a social security net, I just assumed the practice would be swept aside in America given that there are alternate means of obtaining social security and that women here have a greater ability to rise up the socio-economic ladder and support the family. I guess I did not put enough importance in the desire some of these families have to preserve their names through a male heir.
Among Indian families in Santa Clara County in the 1990s, Texas economist Jason Abrevaya found a 58 percent chance of having a son among families that first had two girls — significantly higher than the natural 51 percent chance of having a boy.
The teams found no comparable bias toward boys among white, black and Japanese-American families that first had girls…<
p>Abrevaya found evidence that female infanticide, a practice documented in India and China, is not happening in the U.S. The economists’ data indicates only that some couples have manipulated the natural odds of having a son or daughter; it does not identify the means they used to do it.
“If gender-selective abortion is the cause for the unusual Asian Indian boy birth ratios, then the abortion rate would be 20 to 25 percent of female fetuses who otherwise would have been the family’s third or fourth child,” Abrevaya said… [Link]
One of the main techniques that parents are using to boost the odds of having a male child is something called preimplantation genetic diagnosis (PGD). In this technique the doctor harvests fertilized embryos after identifying their sex and then implants them into the womb.
Some who study the Indian diaspora say son-selection may not die out, even in the U.S. Abrevaya, who found much stronger evidence for son-selection among Indians than among Chinese living in the U.S., worries that as PGD becomes less expensive, more people will use it. [Link]
That was the other fact the surprised me. Indian immigrants are more likely to hang on this practice than Chinese immigrants.
Preeti Shekar, a Berkeley-based journalist and activist who believes there are “sexist and racist consequences” to medical technologies like PGD, has urged a petition campaign to stop the ethnic media from running ads [for PGD]
One San Jose doctor received angry letters after he ran ads in India Currents magazine promoting “sex preselection” services.
Dr. Suresh Nayak uses a technique that selects sperm before conception to greatly increase the odds of having a child of the chosen gender. Nayak did not respond to telephone calls from the San Jose Mercury News, but highlights those services on his Web site. [Link]
<
p>Nayak’s logic for offering this technique doesn’t pass the ethical sniff test for me:
“Being in the obstetrics-gynecology field, I see a fair number of couples terminating pregnancies of the ‘undesired sex’ after doing ultrasounds and amniocentesis,” Nayak wrote. “There would be fewer couples doing that if these same couples used the Ericsson method of sex selection…” [Link]
Even though Abrevaya’s paper isn’t out yet I did find a previous paper by him
on the same topic in case anyone is interested in the data.
All the parents that do this are going to be screwed when their little Majnu grows up and they can’t find a Leila for him. Girls born in China right now have their pick of the crowd. Indian society probably hasn’t suffered from a dearth of females like China currently is. I can understand terminating pregnancies because of fears one isn’t able to give a child a healthy and comfortable life, but sex-selective abortions make me so angry. A female Indian novelist wrote a great book about it. The title escapes me, but it’s about her in-laws trying to force her to abort her baby girl. Ugh.
yes it actually has.
Sad that this kind of stuff has followed to the US…but am not surprised. I’ve seen this happen with our extended friends circle where a couple had three girls and kept trying for a boy…tried to do the selection, but it didnt’ happen.
Everyone knows though…its the girls that will take care of the parents. (at least according to my mother…who has a son and daughter…) =) I kid… I agree with phillygrrl…if everyone has boys, who will they marry?? One would think the more educated and better off you are…this would happen less, but sadly, it happens just as frequently with the educated bunch…
Check out: http://www.koalalabs.com/office.asp
Blaine, WA is south of Surrey, British Columbia, Canada. Surrey is home to one of the largest Sikh communities in Canada. Notice the contact names and telephone numbers for the Blaine clinic. Both contact names are Punjabi, 604 is the area code for Vancouver, and there is a separate telephone number for Punjabi speaking patients. Somehow I don’t think the residents of Whatcom County, WA are the main patients of that clinic…
Sad, but true.
I see this sort of a thing happening all the time in the Telugu community in India and abroad – and I know that there is a scarcity of ‘suitable brides’ in Andhra now.Most hospitals in India (in the urban centres at least) do not reveal the gender of the foetus to parents, as it is illegal to do so.But in the US, there are no such restrictions (obviously because female infanticide is not a problem there I reckon).And this freedom is misused by many people.
It beats comprehension – how can parents decide to abort a perfectly normal foetus just on the basis of gender?
Whatever be the underlying reasons for these ghastly deeds (economic, quasi-religious beliefs about going to punnama narakam,plain male-domination), one thing is for sure – it should make us hand our heads in shame.
I think the only threat that will work with these parents is the looming prospect of their darling boys out-marrying a dissolute American because of the dearth of good little desi bahus, thanks to these choices they are making now. Somebody should remind the parents of this every time there’s an out-marriage.
the looming prospect of their darling boys out-marrying a dissolute American because of the dearth of good little desi bahus
Especially since Caucasians in the US show a slight preference for girls (I think the statistics show that there is a greater number of female infants than is accounted for purely due to the higher mortality of baby boys and other natural factors).
Guys beat girls in leg wrestling ,, just saying.
The more educated ones did generally vote No on Prop 8…
Perhaps, ROMEO 86, but girls are better at pretty much everything else. But let’s not go off-topic.
these “age old” values change, and varied by class. the skew toward sex selection is stronger in areas which have become wealthy, like punjab. in most societies male sex bias is noticeable among elites (probably trivers-willard), but with modern mass affluences the pattern has been one of elite emulation. the same is true of dowry, ethnographic surveys in india show that the practice spread really fast from 1900 to 2000 as many “low caste” groups started doing it so as to prove their bonafides.
japan shifted from male to female preference in 1990. the shift in south korea is happening now. the south korean male:female ratio peaked in 90-95, and is now dropping.
Blaine, WA is south of Surrey, British Columbia, Canada. Surrey is home to one of the largest Sikh communities in Canada. Notice the contact names and telephone numbers for the Blaine clinic. Both contact names are Punjabi, 604 is the area code for Vancouver, and there is a separate telephone number for Punjabi speaking patients. Somehow I don’t think the residents of Whatcom County, WA are the main patients of that clinic…
The sad thing is that no one really cares in Vancouver area about this issue. There are several punjabi MLA and MP’s in area, yet other the odd statement now and then very little is done about this issue. Living in this area I know of several punjabi families who have used this clinic, including one married punjabi women who had 3 abortions after finding out that she was pregant with a female fetus each time.
Last year a punjabi men who had 3 daughters killed his youngest girl cause he was depressed about not having a son. It later came out that his wife could not get a visa to visit this clinic to find out the sex of the child.
The sad thing is that as long we live in PC world, problems like this will never go away, cause nobody will want to speak out, cause they will be afraid to hurt a community feelings.
5 · Kumar said
True. And many urban Indians (not all) follow it too. For its not hard going from a big city to a small one and a little baksheesh will get you anything in India.
Historically, they said they needed boys to plough the fields, work the animals (this, in very old times) but that cold country north of the US border has mechanized farming. So it has to be (some) Indian people stuck in the past.
That’s economic reductionism. Even if the underlying motivation or driving force might is an particular economic motivationn, that doesn’t mean that the ideas, cultural tools, etc., don’t take over. Also, I don’t know the latest statistics on the economic / educational status of who’s emigrating, but if it’s people who can afford to undertake this kind of treatment, then presumably they’re highly educated, which means they probably came from a fairly well off background in South Asia, which means that the “we need a child for social security” argument doesn’t really hold up as well. But that’s something to look into. Finally, there is also an argument to be made that gender bias is an enormous problem in South Asia across income levels, and operates independently of it.
I’d be interested in hearing from women’s rights folks how they think this will intersect with the pro-choice momvement in the U.S. – when international, a lot of work on many issues in many movements is so blind to the different cultural contexts that people end up really poorly equipped to deal with ideas like female foeticide. Now it’s domestic and the difficulty is unavoidable, i would guess.
But that’s for later. What I find particularly galling, on this day of discussing doctors, is that these profit-mongering a$$holes are trying to defend themselves in the article – with one even going so far as to say that because Canadians prefer girls, that balances everything out. What f@#$s.
Maybe some are scared of put and just need to research putrikaputra.
Harisu effect.
I remember seeing those ads in India Currents and feeling disgusted knowing that our community’s shameless practices are so accepted. It’s true about money making anything possible in India, they can pass as many laws as they want but it seems like every other day there’s a new story about hundreds of aborted girl fetuses being discovered under a doctor’s clinic. I’ve been hearing a call for education for years but it seems like a lot of it is based on families themselves and the amount of influence parents and in-laws have. I know multiple families who will keep having children to ensure they have at least one son and a handful of families who only have daughters and are proud of their kids despite the pitying looks they get. I just remembered something my mom told me this weekend. My mom met an Indian woman at the grocery store and of course they started exchanging life stories. The woman has one child and her son is relatively successful but she complained that he was treating her horribly and she had moved into an apartment on her own recently. My mom was sympathetic and started talking about her own kids, two girls, when she was interrupted. The woman was equally sympathetic to my mother’s plight and even though her younger child, me, is in her twenties, the woman told her not to lose faith. “You need a son, God will hear your prayers”, and with that my poor mom inched away.
I love my 4 year old daughter more than anything in the world. 3 times i’ve had people remark “So you gotta try again” after them seeing her or me talking about her. Once while waiting for a table at an IHOP by black guy said to me and my wife after making some small talk (WTF?), once while making small talk with an asian barber, and then by a white co-worker. I think the co-worker was just teasing me about the desi obsession of having a son. It would be nice to have a son next, but I can’t imagine I would not love another daughter the same way I love me 1st daughter.
So let me get this straight, in families that already have 2 girls, there is a 7% increase in the probability that the third child is going to be a boy. And this is a cause for concern because it is going to skew the sex-ratio, lead to the general decrease in population of desi women, and all other evils?!
Is there any comparable data on the impact of already having a son (or two) on the gender of the subsequent child?
Else this is a red-herring.
About the dearth of brides…… Indian newspapers frequently publish stories of men in Haryana(one of the most skewed sex ratios in the country) having to buy brides from Bihar, Bengal and the northeast; along with related stories of abuse….. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/education/3308893/India%27s-craving-for-boy-babies-leads-to-bride-shortage.html
Did you know mother nature prefers boys (because they’re weak at birth and hence having more compensates for it)? Also, another piece of trivia : the womb remembers the gender of the children it has conceived, and somehow this correlates to there being a higher chance that boys that have an elder brother may be gay.
On the sex-selection topic, all I’d say is that you cant just blame the parents for the sins of the society/world at large. If you’re pro-choice (and I’d think most liberal Asians are?), then stop judging someone’s choice or their decision to not have an “unwanted” baby. Or are you saying that its reasonably ok for a rape victim to abort the child, or a teenager to do so, because they cant give the child a good life, but it is totally unacceptable for sane parents to choose what kind of child they can give a good life to?
I know my view maybe contrarian. Just like I think its a fucking double standard for people to judge someone who wishes to have fairer skin but its totally ok for whitey to get a bronze suntan.
2000 looks like a miniscule number compared to the 40 million babies in America killed by pro-choice’rs. I use the number 40 million from the “pro-life” talk radio hosts.
I think there was a Hindi movie made on this. Cannot remember the name. But pretty well detailed what will happen if there was a dearth of girls in a place. The balance in India is anyways really bad. I think there are around 895 girls to every 1000 boys.
Not sure what will happen to the female security in our country in the coming generations. The sad part is that this is not very actively practiced in educated well of urban families too.
Settlers,
The sex ratio is actually about 944 females to 1000 men, The U.S. is 1030 women per 1000 men and the UK is about the same.
Stories like this bring tears to my eyes. I request any families thinking about aborting your female children to contact me. I’ll gladly take them off of your hands. This mommy is still capable of loving and raising more.
Also, the situation in my family is exactly the opposite, I am one of three boys and my parents always wanted a girl :).
This is the data from abhi’s newspaper link
All 134,513 105.2 Asian 43,048 107.2 Hispanic 48,447 103.5 White 37,694 105.6
Assuming that the white number is what we are comparing against, the Hispanic number (2.1) is lower by a larger amount from the white norm, than the Asian number (1.6) is higher. Why a selective hypothesis for the higher number (107.2) with no discussion about the lower number (103.5)? It could be as simple as a normal genetic distribution.
Also, I am suspicious of this kind of data cherry-picking because in Abrevaya’s previous paper (referenced by Abhi), Hispanic & non-Hispanic humbers are clubbed together.
Such startling claims about race or cultural behavior of immigrants needs better data and more thoughtful analysis.
Totally wrong. Many of the people in Canada doing this are financially well-off, but from blue-collar occupations like trucking, construction, transportation, etc. And they come from relatively prosperous rural backgrounds in India but are generally not highly educated. They are definitely not your idea of urbane, professional elites. Even though I’m sure plenty of the latter are doing this stuff too.
Perhaps I’ve just been very naive but I was quite surprised by this finding. Given that the prime reason for preferring sons in Asian countries is that sons serve as a social security net, I just assumed the practice would be swept aside in America given that there are alternate means of obtaining social security and that women here have a greater ability to rise up the socio-economic ladder and support the family. I guess I did not put enough importance in the desire some of these families have to preserve their names through a male heir.
I’m not surprised at all. I was naive about a lot of things till I got married and met an entire community and got more exposure to how much cultural baggage plays into desis in the US who’ve been here a long time and how social structure dictates a man’s and woman’s place.
Until the practice of “parents being looked after and tended to by their kids on a full time basis” goes away the truth of the matter this tihs will continue. And no the looking after and tending to is far less to do with financial security and far more to do with lack of independence and emotional security. It’s so much deeper and complex than simply having a boy and carrying a name which I don’t believe it is at all.
It’s our social structure that dictates that a woman once married will end up taking care of her husband and his parents needs and so that any set of parents are up shit creek if they don’t have sons who’ll be the responsible one. And yeah it doesn’t matter that the daughers could be Astronauts or Surgeons or Judges, the expectations of roles and responsibilities doesn’t change just because ability kicks in. That needs to change first.
Perhaps I’m severely mistaken, but I don’t see the issue here. Consider the Indian American population for a minute. The probability of their first child being male isn’t significantly different than the probability of it being female (as per the article). Apparently, this relationship holds for the second child conditional on the first child being a female as well (again, as per the article).
Only given that the family has had two girls does the probability of having a third, male child increase. All this is saying to me is that Indian couples in the US keep reproducing until they have children of both genders. We cannot accept the hypothesis of sex selection without further evidence. Here’s a competing hypothesis: Indian folk in the US want to have at least “one of each.” In any case, if sex selection doesn’t come into play unless you’ve had two daughters, and then you only have one more kid, would this behavior really impact sex ratios at birth? I don’t know.
And, just as a reminder: the paper finds no evidence of abortion/infanticide. It finds evidence of sex imbalances.
The other factor that is not being discussed here is the D word: Dowry. How many of the immigrants that practice gender specific abortion come from communities or regions where dowry demands are very heavy – like Punjab, Rajasthan, Gujarat, Haryana, Bihar, etc.? That tradition is, in my opinion, the single worst contributor to the negative value attached to girls, regardless of how wealthy or educated their families might be. Which is probably why the sex ratio is so particularly bad in states like Punjab, Haryana and Rajasthan. Way more men than women here.
This really surprised me. As far as my family here goes the women are the one’s who call up their parents to check on them etc. My husband and I are discussing adopting a girl from South Asia after having two boys and we have encountered much resistance from his Punjabi family. They have a lot of concerns about how money will be divided and whether we will introduce bad genes into the family etc etc. (sigh) Pretty nauseating discussions.
20 · suede said
Being pro-choice means I don’t think the issue is the government’s business, but I reserve the right to make all the moral and ethical judgments about their behavior that I think necessary. Freedom to choose doesn’t free you from the consequences of your choices.
31 · browne said
What would be “bad” genes? Would her complexion not be wheatish enough? To be honest, if there is actually any significant genetic divergence at all between slum-kids and rich kids (it’s very very very unlikely that there is), it would be the kids from the slums who would be more genetically predisposed to being healthy. Poverty shows no mercy to the infirm.
Abhi — I don’t know if you’re naive, but you have really great hair.
Now that we’ve got that out of the way — I posted an article to this effect on the SM tipline about a year or two ago — based on Canadian data. I think it was deleted — which is reasonable since it was from a racist Canadian publication.
Below is a table on sex ratios by visible minority group of Canadian-born kids under 15 (data from Census 2006).
Whites — 2.21m boys, 2.06 m girls, sex ratio: 1.05 (which is about normal) South Asians — 120K boys, 111 girls, sex ratio: 1.08 Chinese — 79K boys, 74K girls, sex ratio: 1.06 Blacks — 95K Boys, 92K girls, sex ratio: 1.03 Latin Americans — 19K boys, 19K girsl, sex ratio: 1.00 Arabs — 24K boys, 24K girsl, sex ratio 1.00 (!)
Want to see something really depressing. Abbotsford, BC is a town about 20% Sikh. Here is the ratio of Canadian-born kids under 15 for the South Asians of Abbotsford
South Asians in Abbotsford — 3,330 boys, 2775 girls, sex ratio: 1.20.
Crappiest statistic on SM all year.
Abhi writes: >>Perhaps I’ve just been very naive but I was quite surprised by this finding.
Perhaps I’ve just been very naive, but I was quite surprised that this study was conducted by economists! I mean, this is a social issue, maybe an immigration issue and definitely a gender issue so I would have thought that these kinds of studies to have been conducted by sociologists, immigration experts, gender studies departments and the like.
But economists!
Seems like economists at Columbia and Texas universities have a lot of time and funding on their hands. I mean, we are in the midst of the worst economic tsunami in at least a century, most certainly the whole world will go into a lengthy depression, all paper currencies will deflate in the next couple of years and half the countries in the world will catch “Icelanditis” and face starvation by 2012. Shouldn’t this be what these economists need to be studying and providing solutions and guidance for? Isn’t that their core competency? Paramjeet Kaur aborting her third female foetus should not exactly be the top priority for these people.
Good! Societal ostracision is the only solution to this problem.
M. Nam
this is interesting but at the end of the day its no big deal. the 2nd gen will become more westernized and the traditions will die off naturally, plus there is an apparent female preference in the larger community that other commentators have referred to (what does this mean btw, are male pre-borns being killed??) so everything balances out anyway.
what i mean by no big deal is that i see no compelling state interest to restrict the abortion rights of women as well as the free speech/economic rights of doctors. as far as trying to discourage this activity with non-violent means i suppose it couldn’t hurt but i think its safe to assume, short of the development of a highly isolated immigrant community, these old-world ways will inevitably get crushed by the new.
Ignorance, blind faith, mindless adherence to traditional values without critical re-evaluation in light of modern times-all reasons why we have a community of kuri-maars(girl killers). Women have a large role to play in this-I hear old mataji’s and even younger mothers-in-law frequently complain about ‘munda ho janda’(wish it were a son) but never old men. Women need to be the front line in this battle-they can just as easily keep their traps shut when their daughter-in-law or daughter is pregnant with a daughter. Women are the girl-childs worst enemy.
10 · phillygrrl said
Beards??
35 · MoorNam said
spoken like a true libertarian! ron paul ftw!
It is disgusting, but there will be a “correction”. Many Rajasthani men already have to go bride hunting in Kerala and the parents of women in India no longer find NRIs desirable. 20 years from now people who insist on maintaining caste and devaluing women will have to enter a polyandrous marriage 🙂
What’s with the desi paper editorial/ad sales teams being so icky? Surely there’s enough business with horoscopes, godmen, Bollywood Extravaganzas
Girls have ’em at a much better location!
These parents better hope that their hard won sons are 6 feet tall & Haavad grads, going to be lots of competition. And even if India isn’t quite shining they can’t count on having their pick in the motherland anyomore.
You’d be surprised. Many economists don’t study (or, for that matter, even know much about) the economy. There are lots of top economists who have done important [useful] work in the fields of health and demography.
Among Muslim Indians, the gender ratio is equal, as is the case in Arab and other Muslim nations.
20 · suede said
It’s not that your views are contrarian, it’s that you’re not exprsesing clearly the underlying hurt that you’re feeling, whether about race or gender or anything else, and instead you’re projecting it on to the world. This makes it harder to empathize with you, because a lot of what you’re saying many people might find objectionable.
Ven,
I don’ think that is true for Muslims in India, per this link the ratio is definitely better than Hindus but not equal.
25 · umber desi said
It’s very easy for some Desi families to say after a boy has already been born. It doesn’t really say anything about the general preference for boys.
Delurker,
With all due respect, you have no idea about my family and what they were thinking and what they reactions were, I never said it meant anything but stated something that happened in my family.
–I’d be interested in hearing from women’s rights folks how they think this will intersect with the pro-choice momvement in the U.S. – when international, a lot of work on many issues in many movements is so blind to the different cultural contexts that people end up really poorly equipped to deal with ideas like female foeticide. Now it’s domestic and the difficulty is unavoidable, i would guess.–
firstly we need to stop calling sex-selection abortions as infanticide or foeticide. it is abortion and as long as it is legal, which it should be, it is a personal decision a woman should make. no matter which culturally sensitive way one approaches it is curtailing of a woman’s right to have an abortion and it is simply wrong and illegal.
the preference for male children and the murder of women and female children connected to this idea is NOT an all-India phenomena (note the comment to surrey, canada) and so we need to stop characterizing it that way as well. such murders should be prosecuted as crime. it has nothing to do with abortion rights. if there are people so crass and greedy and stupid as to not want female children they don’t deserve girls and daughters. women will, and do, suffer in these communities anyway.
this sort of discourse only provides more ammunition to the pro-life anti-abortion groups. they don’t don’t any such thing.
42 · louiecypher said
I think you might be right. The post (which is a reproduction of an article in an unnamed magazine) doesn’t cite any statistics, but given what I know and have seen of India’s yuppie women, I’m inclined to believe it. That doesn’t mean, however, that it will usher in wholesale women’s lib.
Regarding Indian women in their mid-20 to early-30s: what I have seen is that while the parents want their daughters to get a good education and climb the economic ladder, they still maintain a grip over her social life. Girls are expected to live up to traditional social expectations on top of bringing in money for the family.