Unnatural Selection: Chapter 1- The Demographer

I don't think about demographics, like...ever. I've used the word when referring to  hipster type groups of people while discussing my husband's music, "Oh, hun, yea that's totally your demographic," but that's the extent of my commitment to understanding the word or the actual scientific field that bares its name.

Here's the thing: apparently, demographics are important. Demographics tell the story of mankind. Where we've been and where we're going. Red flags are raised when demographers follow trends and don't love the road they go down. This was certainly the case for Christophe Guilmoto, the French demographer who is our protagonist in Hvistendahl's first chapter of  Unnatural Selection.

Here's the gist of what Guilmoto has been working on over the past several years:

For some reason, he noticed that there were way more boys than girls being born, so he started to focus on counting those boys. They aren't EXTRA boys, it turns out, really there are just WAY fewer girls being born. A nice healthy sex ratio is about 105 boys for ever 100 girls. What Guilmoto was finding was that the number of boys was much higher than number of girls, dramatically higher. Like, change the balance of the planet high. In India, at the time the book was written, there were 111 boys for every 100 girls, in South Korea it was 109 for every 100, in China a whopping 120 for ever 100...

So what? Right? A couple extra boys here and there can't be that big of a deal. Wrong. Hvistendahl calls this birth ratio imbalance "unrivaled in human history." Unrivaled. That means that NEVER BEFORE IN RECORDED HISTORY has the world seen such an intense imbalance in nature's male/female ratio for mankind.

Why does it matter? It matters because, well, the human race needs women to carry on. Less obvious are such concerns like increased human trafficking, kidnapping and an increase in violence among male dominated cultures. It matters because there is a growing paradigm that girls are far less valuable then boys. As countries begin to develop, the value and worth of baby girls deteriorates.

When I was in undergraduate school I spent A LOT of time writing on the subject of the dignity of women. I actually wrote my undergrad thesis on the subject. There is something magical about being a woman. The mind blowing power to give life, to nourish and heal with our bodies, the incredible sensitivity and intuition that women have, all these things and so much more not only improve the lives of the people we encounter, they provide an irreplaceable component of the human experience.

Maybe that is why I am so passionate about this crisis. It is utterly heart-wrenching to me. If we don't turn things around, and fast, the whole world...all of us...will be in big trouble. 200 million lost...sounds like endangered species status to me. By the time this crisis reaches it peak, when today's little children are tomorrow's adults, you and I will be very old, only able to watch and recollect the time when the solution was our responsibility. I don't want our children to scramble for a solution. I don't want our children to have no choice but to wander into uncharted territory, uncertain of how to solve a global population problem. I don't want our children to experience unrivaled imbalances in the sex ratio and all the unforeseeable problems that come with it. 

I don't mean to be a "Debbie Downer," and really I've noticed that I tend to learn about something, get sad, mope around a bit and then get motivated to act. I past the mope and on to motivated. Although in someways, the problem of gender selection still seems like someone else's far away problem, I know it's mine too. The more I learn and read the more real it becomes and the more I realize that today's action can solve tomorrow's problems.