考研阅读精选：女儿的报答

考研网

The daughter’s return
A glimmer of hope in the sad tale of sex-selective abortion in India
Dec 31st 2011 | from the print edition

  THE march of sex-selective abortion in Asia seems relentless. Not every  society adopts the practice, but those that do—and they include the two  largest countries on earth—have seen it spread through every social  group, unhampered by growing wealth. Indeed, middle-income couples seem  more willing and better able to manipulate the sex of their children  than are the poor. And they are more likely to want smaller families,  increasing the premium on sons in countries where males are seen as more  valuable.
As a result, richer areas have more sex selection  than poorer ones and sex selection tends to rise as countries get  richer. In China the sex ratio at birth is much more distorted in rich  Shanghai and Guangzhou than in poor Tibet. From 2001-11, India’s GDP  more than doubled and the census of 2011 found only 914 girls aged 0-6  for every 1,000 boys, worse even than the abysmal tally in 2001, when  there were 927 girls per 1,000 boys. (India counts the sex ratio  differently from the rest of the world, which expresses the idea as the  number of boys per 100 girls; using the international measure, India’s  child sex ratio rose from 108 in 2001 to 109.5 in 2011.) In 2001 India  had 6m fewer girls than boys aged 0-6; by 2011 the number had risen to  7m.
It has long been assumed the process of reversing sex  selection does not happen until countries are richer than India or China  are now. One of the few to have succeeded in ending the practice is  South Korea, where the sex ratio at birth peaked in 1990 and has since  fallen to near-normal levels. South Korea did not manage fully to  reverse the trend until its GDP per person had reached about $12,000.  China’s is now $8,400, India’s $3,700. Both countries have been  campaigning against sex-selective abortion for years, making it illegal  to terminate pregnancies just because parents want a son (or indeed to  inform parents of the sex of a fetus), launching “save the daughter”  campaigns, and—in India’s case—enlisting Bollywood stars to sing the  praises of girls. All, it seems, to no avail.
Now, however,  comes evidence that India may in fact be succeeding. In a pair of  articles in the Indian Express, Surjit Bhalla, an economist, and  Ravinder Kaur, a sociologist, use a different set of figures to get a  different result. On the basis of the national sample surveys (NSS),  they calculate that India’s sex ratio at birth swung from 924 females  per 1,000 males in 2004-05 to 977 in 2011, a stunning turnaround in  favour of girls.
The NSS figure is not comparable to the  census. It shows the sex ratio at birth, whereas the census shows the  ratio for children aged 0-6 (census figures for the sex ratio at birth  have not been published). But there are reasons for thinking the NSS is  reliable. The sample size, of 125,000 households, is large. And when the  NSS does produce figures comparable to the census, they closely match  it (for example, the NSS and census figures for the child sex ratio in  2001 and 2011 are almost identical). The new figure represents a very  big change. A sex ratio of 977 girls to 1,000 boys is closer to what  prevailed in the 1960s than it is to more recent decades.
So  it is possible that the sex ratio has begun to change recently in ways  not captured by the census. If so, why? Mr Bhalla and Ms Kaur pin the  explanation squarely on the behaviour of parts of India’s middle class.  What they call the mature middle class, those with an annual income of  170,000 rupees ($3,200) for a family of five, no longer practises sex  selection. Ms Kaur’s research in five Indian states finds that richer  middle-class families are no longer using sons as vehicles for upward  mobility. A combination of female education, the spread of “modern”  social attitudes through television, government policies and a dawning  sense that daughters are more likely than sons to look after parents in  old age are all having a cumulative effect. This is persuading the  richer parts of the middle class that girls are as valuable as boys. The  authors reckon this slice of the population has almost doubled in size  in six years, from 27% in 2005 to 50% in 2011, so its preferences  explain the change in the figures.
The argument might seem to  contradict the view that sex selection rises as people get richer. In  fact, at slightly lower levels of income, the link is as strong as ever.  Mr Bhalla and Ms Kaur find sex selection has run rampant among what  they call the emerging middle classes—those with an income of  90,000-170,000 rupees a year. But since this group has declined as a  share of the population, from 68% in 2000 to 41% now, their preferences  have a smaller impact.