Book Review: Unnatural Selection: Choosing Boys Over Girls and the Consequences of a World Full of Men

Posted on Aug 11, 2011 and very interesting as is the case with their other articles. You could also subscribe to their Friday Fax and stay informed on important issues.

 

 

 

By Susan Yoshihara, Ph.D.

Part I: Shattering Myths About Sex Selective Abortion

August 11, 2011 (C-FAM) One night in 1978 a student in Delhi’s most prestigious obstetrics program reported for his first delivery. Just then he saw a cat bound from the hospital room with a “thing…wet with blood, mangled” in its mouth. Unfazed, the doctors and nurses went on to perform more abortions than births, several at six or seven months of pregnancy. When the student finally asked a nurse why the aborted child was not treated with more care she replied flatly: “Because it was a girl.”

Such descriptions permeate journalist Mara Hvistendahl’s first book, Unnatural Selection: Choosing Boys Over Girls and the Consequences of a World Full of Men.

More than 160 million women are missing in Asia alone due to sex selective abortion, a number greater than all the females now living in the United States. The ratio of boys to girls born in Asia has risen to ever more unthinkable highs and Hvistendahl seeks to understand why.

Her findings buck conventional wisdom. She starts by refuting the idea that sex selection is about poverty. It is the wealthy—like Delhi’s most prestigious hospitals and clientele—who initiate the practice, while the general population sadly follows suit. Los Angeles’ boutique in-vitro fertilization trade is the latest episode in the crisis.  

Despite the common narrative, son preference, per se, is not the main cause. Rather, the rise of abortion and fertility control—in countries of diverse cultural practices from Azerbaijan to China—are the common thread.

Hvistendahl draws from Matthew Connelly’s 2008 history of population control to show how population advocates saw compound benefits of culling the number of potential mothers. In one example, she painstakingly tracks money, medical technology, and Malthusian ideas from the West to India, where the Army and elite government-backed physicians inculcated the rest of the nation’s doctors. The Rockefeller Foundation, International Planned Parenthood Federation, Population Council, and most of all the Ford Foundation, invested in spreading sex selection.

While such liberal institutions garner most of the blame, Hvistendahl indicts the Republican establishment as well. US Army general William Draper, who merits a whole chapter, saw widespread abortion as a way to keep Japan and China from reemerging militarily after the Second World War.  Draper saw too little time for a “sustained educational effort” about family planning and found abortion more practical anyway: it was easier for operatives to spot a pregnant woman than one considering conception. Draper later founded Population Action International, an international abortion research and advocacy organization.

The paucity of marriageable females has diminished, not enhanced, women’s status:  bride buying, with little or no consent, abounds. Hvistendahl includes heartrending interviews with girls abducted in their early teens and forced to have sex with 17 men a day for three months in order to initiate them into prostitution. 

The last myth Hvistendahl shatters is the feminists’ claim that they defend women against such abuse. To the contrary, she finds a conspiracy of silence. Hvistendahl’s scrutiny of the UN Population Fund’s role in the crisis is the subject of next week’s Friday Fax.

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Youth Bait.

You may not realize it but there is a lot going on every weekend targeting the youth.

There are very many initiatives in Nairobi that have functions meant to put across certain ideas to the unformed minds of our young people.

Some of these ideas are good while some are just downright harmful.

I, for one, have decided that I will never attend another Kenyan movie unless I can get the full story before hand.

My decision comes after my last movie Ndoto za Elibidi.

The general trend with the movies I have watched is the encouragement of fornication or pre-marital sex, the promotion of trust condoms and other silly and retarding western ideas.

I don’t need to pay to experience such garbage as it is all around us. I call it garbage because it has been proven to be toxic to society by the societies of the very western promoters.

Kenya has modelled the UK quite a bit now so it’s not entirely wrong to look at the UK to try and foretell our future. That is one of the advantages of being a developing nation and a former colony of the UK.

Right now some children have no qualms about putting parents into ‘old people’s homes’ or nursing homes if your prefer a ‘burry your head in the sand’ term for it. They have grown up seeing and experiencing the selfishness of their parents with regards to material things and personal time and have come to believe it is okay to keep your time for yourself and to prefer space, material goods and peace of mind to sacrifice for others and therefore are okay with locking up parents in such homes.

I have worked in these homes in the UK and the picture is a very sad one. The parents quickly deteriorate once they are booked into them. Soon dementia sets in and the home becomes a loony house for once normal people.

Where are your children right now?

Who are your children with right now?

What are they telling your children right now?

What sort of a future are they preparing for your children right now?

Where are you in all this either now or in the future?

Go on, ask your child if s/he loves you and make them promise they will never put you into such a place.

Who knows, they might just remember the promise and keep it.

Don’t complain!

 

Don’t complain that you have to walk in dangerous conditions even though you are taxed heavily.

Don’t complain that the footpaths are nothing more than mounds of mud and stone.

 

Don’t complain that what’s left of the footpath is muddy and blocked by hawkers’ wares.

 

Don’t complain that the open drains are now being used to carry human excrement, that they are the sewerage lines or that they pass outside your favourite shopping mall even though it is a known fact that what you are smelling you are actually tasting.

 

Don’t complain that the human waste is ending up in your rivers and in ground water with the possibility of contaminating ground water and hence borehole water.

 

Don’t complain about the smell and the dust you are breathing in because it will not affect you as much as your children; they will develop respiratory diseases and strange cancers as they will breath it in for longer as they are younger. The dust is already eating away at your lungs and eyes so if you are getting allergies and irritations… don’t complain.

 

Don’t complain about badly built and dirty roads even though these have been built using your taxes and will continue to be repaired badly using your taxes. Don’t complain that these bad roads will make you poorer by the day as you spend more and more money on car repairs and on medical bills.

 

Don’t complain about the dangers waiting for your children on the streets even though you do not get tax breaks when you spend money on their medical bills.

 

Don’t complain that you are paying for parking and having it rough every day trying to get a parking space. Don’t complain that the Council collects fees and you don’t see what’s being done by the same council.

Don’t complain that they don’t keep your streets clean or unblock the drains meaning that when the rains come, the roads will be a nightmare.

 

Don’t complain that the garbage is not collected by the same council that collects the land rates and other fees. Don’t complain that some of this garbage is hazardous and is slowly making you and your family sick – because what you smell, you taste and because it slowly vaporises or turns into dust that your children and you will breath in.

Don’t complain that your shop was closed at night and that now you’re out of a job just because the owner got a better deal and couldn’t be bothered about your welfare. Don’t complain that there is no one to stand up for you.

Don’t complain that your money was used to build Muthurwa market and now there’s only misery to show for the millions spent meaning that people are sinking deeper and deeper into poverty even if they are working harder with each day. One day a large number of them will decide that if their leaders can steal and get away with it then they can too and they will kill and rape to get what they feel is their right. One of those killed or raped will be a loved one. Hey! Just don’t complain.

Don’t complain that he delays caused by the mess that is the infrastructure are hurting your business or loved ones who are coming home irritable and too tired to play with the children or to listen or talk to you.

 

Don’t complain that the matatus will try to cover their costs by raising their fares and this will mean less disposable income to buy your products and services. Don’t complain that it is hurting the economy and hurting you since the revenue lost is revenue that would have been spent on making a better country.

Of course that would be the case if you did not have the same old leaders running this country aground every five years. Don’t complain, though, that you always get the same old leaders election year after election year.

 

Don’t complain that the country still looks like a dump even close to half a century after it was granted independence.

Don’t complain that your food comes from a very filthy place every day of every year all because you have a government that just don’t care and only sees you as a headache and a slave at best.

Don’t complain about wasted human resources that could be doing a lot of good for the country; the economy doesn’t offer anything better.

 

Don’t complain that Nairobi should not have water and sewerage problems and every part of the City should be well serviced with these basics.

Don’t complain that you are having to use generators and at a great cost too – rising fuel prices despite Nairobi having a power supply company that charges an arm and a leg for electricity. You are getting poorer by the day or not progressing as much as you would if this were not the case.

 

 

Don’t complain about a poor transport system and the chaos this causes. Chaos that makes you spend more time on the road rather than doing the things you love.

Don’t complain about images of nudity. Don’t complain about images of a pornographic nature used to lure people to strip clubs for so-called ‘Adult entertainment’. Don’t complain that they are ruining your men and your children. Turning boys and men into beasts and making your daughters think that the sex industry is an alternative source of employment and easy cash.

Don’t complain about the breakdown trucks that wait by the roadside to prey on victims of corrupt law enforcement agents.

 

Don’t complain about vehicles that are not roadworthy even though they belong to the City Council – symbol of inhuman treatment and misuse of public funds. They would not let you get away with anything no matter how minor. Don’t complain about poor road repair techniques that inconvenience you and in the end have to be repeated in a short time.

Don’t  complain about negligent electrical work that can be a hazard to road users.

 

Don’t complain if you are not ready to do anything about your country.

Let those who believe it’s their right to plunder this nation go ahead and get their fill.

Just don’t complain when things get out of hand and your children find themselves living in hell on earth.