You’ve Got Male

Two hundred years ago, demographers imagined that the problem of a crowded planet was purely sexual—that if humans controlled their impulses, the situation would take care of itself. Typically, Thomas Malthus (1798) also predicted a gloomy future on the presumption that a population’s growth naturally outstrips its food production rates. As this disparity widens, the result is starvation and nutritional catastrophe.

Malthus was wrong. He didn’t take account of factors such as increasing food trade between peoples and advances in agricultural production. He ignored the role of progress and global interdependence through importing and exporting food and materials.

As the experience of Europe shows, it is technological progress, not food availability that is the real brake on human population increase. In countries where higher standards of living have been made possible by the fact of globalisation, the impetus to have fewer children has impacted on social consciousness, practices and policy.

In Europe, the practicality and desirability of child rearing has declined for the past 200 years as work opportunities for alternative fulfilment for women have increased. Postponing childbirth and preventing it through contraception have been significant factors in the decline in numbers of Europeans (and of other industrially advanced peoples).

The problems arising from differential population growth rates and scientific development are compounded by differences in gender-specific birth rates. The normal biological pattern for any population is that some 5 per cent more males than females are born. Because males die at higher rates than females, the sex ratio evens out until later ages when females again outnumber males. In technologically advanced nations, the sex ratio is 105 (women): 100 (men). In more populous, less-developed nations, the sex ratio is reversed due to patriarchal prejudices, abortion practices, femicide and government policies restricting childbirths.

Thirty years ago China, for example, sought to limit its population growth by imposing birth quotas in all its provinces. Village committees were established to regulate at what age whom could have whom and when they could start trying. The committees recorded menstrual cycles and contraceptive use. When the prescribed child arrived, couples were under obligation to be sterilised and conformists were rewarded. Non-conformists were penalised.

By the 1990s, some 80 per cent of all Chinese couples of child-bearing age had been sterilised. With these measures, China reached projected targets decades ahead of schedule. The unintended consequence of this success, however, was that China’s sex ratio became lop-sided: 84 females to every 100 males, with the infant mortality rate for females in some regions twice that of males.

This missing female population isn’t exclusively Chinese, but it is a feature of Third World practices. In South Korea, it is estimated that 30,000 female foetuses are aborted every year purely because they are not the sex (male) that couples want. When other female mortality rates due to lack of adequate food, health care and medical attention are added to this practice, it is estimated that some 100 million females are “missing” from the sex ratios of the less-developed world at any given time.

This tragic human predicament reminds us that when we attempt to solve one problem (overpopulation) we often create another (sex-ratio imbalance). Population control through technology or government edict and policing have merely exposed the andocentric heart of the procreative impulse.

Weighed against the biblical value placed equally on all humans regardless of sex and colour, gender and ethnicity, we see prejudice, science and political considerations inadvertently conspiring to permanently imbalance the global sex ratio. We may like the power of playing God by choosing the sex of our offspring and their gender destiny, but it is clear that we lack divine foresight to see just where the game might end and compassion to appreciate the human cost involved.

Sources
UNDP Human Development Reports 1996-2002.
Anthony Giddens, Sociology, 2000.
David Newman, Sociology, 2002.

Extract from Signs of the Times, December 2003.

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