Unnatural Selection: Chapter 3- The Economist

Ermergerd.

I just had my mind blown. The complexity and paradox of this entire situation was just illuminated ever so slightly for me as I read chapter three. It was like shining a flashlight into the vast darkness: you finally can see a little bit, but you also realize how much remains to be seen. There's a lot going on here; "complex" doesn't scratch the surface. So far, I've seen the problem as something far away, that me and my culture have nothing to do with. Pffft. Wrong.

The more I learn about life, the more I learn how interconnected things really are. The more I learn about this part of life in particular, the more I realize that the same holds true, unfortunately, even for the darker parts of the human story.

Gender selection didn't just crop up randomly in countries that began developing.  The crisis we know today was put in motion years ago and was influenced by choices made with heavy influence from Western ideas. Here's what happened:

Hvistendahl mentions that "sex selection is a byproduct  of a sudden drop in fertility. And for at least the last sixty years, sudden drops in fertility have been inextricably tied up with development." So what does this mean? Essentially it means that when a country begins to grow economically people begin to have fewer children, when people have fewer children they have more money to spend and the economy continues to grow. It's cyclical, really.

There's something else at play here, as well. It isn't just that women in these countries who are enjoying life in the middle class have decided to strive for only male children...oh no, there's much more to this story.

In the early 1950s the UN Population Division released projections for population growth over the next several decades. Their predictions of an ever climbing global population sent  many Westerners into a tailspin, totally freaked out that all these extra people (caused by longer lifespans of the older folks) would surely send developing countries into deep poverty. It wasn't the poverty part that was bothersome, it was the concern that these poor countries would go "Red," you know, become communist. This fear of looming communist take-overs, in combination with the fact that the West was "losing their grip" over regions like Latin America, Africa and Asia were the catalysts for a ripple effect that ultimately resulted in the institution of such whoppers like China's one-child policy. YIKES.

In order to help stave off the potential population crisis, groups like the Population Council (thank you, Rockefeller) and the Population Crisis Committee, founded by Hugh Moore, (the Dixie Cup guy) developed. These groups in conjunction with the World Bank, the Ford Foundation, the United Nations Population Fund and others, took it upon themselves to convince most of Asia that fewer children lead to richer countries. The road to wealth was population control, more specifically birth control.

( I have to say that as I was reading this chapter I felt as if I was uncovering some huge, awful conspiracy. I was, all at once, totally compelled by the story, appalled by what felt like trickery on the parts of Rockefeller and the like, and guilt-striken to learn what a HUGE role the US played in creating such problem.

The thing that bothers me the most is that all of the action taken by these groups was based on a projection, a fancy guess. That's an awful lot of trouble to go through to save the world  from  a potential Communist take over that may or may not happened based on numbers that were, at the time, simply theoretical, and subject to change depending on whether or not there were factors in the projection that, perhaps had not been accounted for, but....hey better safe than sorry?

Ok, ok. So I'm a little heavy on the sarcasm today, I'm just taking this pretty hard I guess. Anyway...)

These groups eventually got Asian nations on board with birth control and it was  around that time in the late 60s  that more over-population propaganda came in the form of a book called The Population Bomb ( nutshell: too many people means the end of the world as we know it....RUUUUN).  Now it was getting coo-coo. Countries like Korea and China began writing "family planning" policies into their economic plans, and India was subjected to "draconian experiments directed at getting couples to stick to two children."  Oh, by the way, almost all of these projects were funded with Western money. What's more, China's one-child policy was directly (although unintentionally) influenced by a Westerner named Geert Jan Oslder, whose banter about a paper he wrote on Population Planning over a few beers with China's Song Jian became the very work the One-child policy was  later born out of.

All of these actions set Asia up for trouble, and with the heavy cultural preference for boys in this region of the world, it's easy to see how the balance became shifted so heavily. I doubt that the folks involved in getting the Population Control Machine rolling had any idea of what kind of Pandora's Box they were opening, and perhaps they truly believed that they were protecting the world from the evils of communism. But I am really bothered by the whole thing. It wasn't the abject poverty of millions that was the catalyst for such a drastic and enormous plan to start limiting the number of children people in other countries were having, it was to protect the assets and interests of those countries already experiencing wealth and power. Blarf. I'm a little bit heartbroken. Hindsight, as they say, is 20-20, and of course from my perspective the whole thing seems unreal, that a few powerful men and a few powerful companies could literally change policies of other governments really just through propaganda. Is fear-mongering too strong a word to use? Maybe I'm over-reacting, but if the West played such a pivotal role in the introduction of population control in countries that are knee deep in serious gender imbalances, then it only seems fair that the West be heavily involved in fixing the crisis they helped create. Just sayin'.