The Means of Reproduction: Sex, Power, and the Future of the World (34 page)

The coming of sex-selection technology overtook this sluggish process, amplifying all the country’s atavisms. Skewed gender ratios are the terrible result of one kind of progress. The ultimate solution will have to be progress of another kind. “Culture and tradition is not a monolith,” said Bedi. “It is not permanent. It changes. For example, twenty years ago it was ridiculous to see a girl from a small town from [the state of] Utter Pradesh to come to Delhi, live on her own, and earn money, because the money she earned was a pittance. Now she works in a call center and earns ten times more than her father, and it is acceptable. Social acceptability follows economic compulsions.” He is fulsomely cynical about the “awareness campaigns” and street plays put on by many NGOs. But, he said, “if people realize after two hundred years that those who have two daughters have a better quality of life than those who have two sons, then it will obviously change.”

S
outh Korea, the first Asian country to begin to reverse the trend of sex selection, offers a hopeful example that such change needn’t take two hundred years. To be sure, South Koreans continue to have more boys than girls, but the ratio of male to female births has been declining since the 1990s. Interestingly, it has been falling in tandem with the total fertility rate, the opposite of the usual pattern, in which the desire for fewer children leaves less space for daughters.
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“Until a few years ago, South Korea appeared to epitomize the pattern of rising sex ratios despite rapid development—with dramatic increases in levels of education, industrialization, and urbanization, as well as in women’s education and participation in the formal labor force,” researchers Woojin Chung and Monica Das Gupta wrote in a 2007 World Bank paper. “By the mid-1990s, South Korea was officially included as a member of the developed countries’ club, the [Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development]. Yet sex ratios at birth rose steeply during this period.”
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It was the same paradox now seen in India. As Chung and Das Gupta point out, “This flew in the face of over a century of social science theory,” which had always posited that modernization lessened the pull of tradition and made status dependent on individual achievement rather than immutable identity. It also seemed to challenge the idea that increased education and female employment reduce gender inequalities within households.
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The operative word is “seemed.” Chung and Das Gupta make an important distinction “between the
intensity
of son preference felt by people, and its actual
manifestation
on the ground in sex ratios,” and they show that the two can actually move in opposite directions. When new technology makes sex selection accessible, sex ratios can get worse even as attitudes are getting more progressive. “Moreover,” they write, “since educated women are typically better able to access and implement these new technologies, studies can even appear to suggest that gender outcomes for children are worsened by development, and even by improvements in the position of women.”

This is a distortion, though, caused by a lag between social change and technological advancement. In fact, the number of South Korean women who said they “must have a son” fell slowly between 1985 and 1991, and then precipitously after that. Son preference, Chung and Das Gupta found, “declines with increasing socio-economic status, lower parental control, younger birth cohort, and older age at marriage.” Less intense desire for boys is significantly correlated with living in cities, especially big ones.
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It took a few years for behavior to catch up with beliefs, but eventually the new values snowballed through the population.

Interestingly, these changes took place despite the fact that until very recently South Korean government policy purposely worked to prop up patriarchy. (Abortion, in fact, is highly restricted in South Korea, though safe illegal terminations, performed by doctors, are widely available.) Thus, Chung and Das Gupta speculate that change could come to China and India even before they reach Korea’s level of modernization. “It is notable that in China and India, public policies have sought to lead changes in social norms, whereas in South Korea public policies sought to
prevent
changes in social norms,” they write. “Without these countervailing public policies, son preference may have declined in South Korea before it reached such high levels of development. This offers hope that in China and India, public policies will accelerate the process of change such that son preference may decline before they reach South Korea’s levels of development.”
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D
espite such cause for optimism, though, to experts and activists in India the crisis is too acute to wait for an evolution in gender norms. Besides, as Sen pointed out, the Indian case is complicated by dowry. Had outsize dowry demands not proliferated across southern India, perhaps that region, more socially progressive than the north, might have seen something akin to the South Korean phenomenon, she said. As it is, though, sex selection can’t be effectively tackled without taking on the system that turns women into financial liabilities—an epochal challenge, one that will require something close to a revolution in deeply rooted ideas about marriage and family. Dowry, said Sen, was a major issue for the women’s movement in the 1980s, but it proved so implacable that dispiritedness set in. But no matter the difficulty, such efforts have to be revived, both for their own sake and for there to be any hope of righting the country’s gender balance. “I think this is a nexus that has to be dealt with together,” she said.

With masculinization out of control, almost everyone sees the need for more immediate intervention. “I think it’s a struggle over the long haul, but some sort of tough and salutary short-term punishments for doctors who provide the service wouldn’t hurt,” said Sen. Some in the government clearly agree. In April 2008 the Health minister, responding to “shockingly low” conviction rates, called for tough new measures against sex determination practitioners, including longer jail terms, higher fines, and special public prosecutors to handle cases. “Launching the country’s biggest ever campaign against the ‘inhuman and uncivilised practise’ of female feticide, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh ... said no nation, society or community could hold its head high and claim to be part of a civilised world if it condoned the practice of discriminating against women,” reported the
Times of India
.
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It remains to be seen whether this time the law will be enforced with more zeal than in the past. While most experts welcome such a move, few believe it will be nearly enough. Already technology is one step ahead. Though illegal, in vitro fertilization clinics offer sex selection without abortion to those who can afford it. Meanwhile, some Western companies are marketing at-home tests with names like Pink or Blue over the Internet for a few hundred dollars. Women using them send a drop of blood to the companies’ laboratories, which claim they can tell the sex of the fetus a mere six or seven weeks after conception by analyzing fetal DNA in the mother’s bloodstream. The Indian government has talked about blocking access to the companies’ Web sites, an idea that only underscores how powerless it is to stem the adoption of new innovations by a free people hungry for them.
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There will be no easy answer. Once again India is faced with the specter of demographic catastrophe, and once again the only sustainable solution lies in making a massive commitment to women’s rights. Doing what needs to be done would be controversial, socially disruptive, and extraordinarily difficult politically. As disparate as India’s cultures are, most of them are bound up with female submission. Any threat to that order would arouse the rage of those who see the self-abnegation of women as the essence of virtue and the guarantee of group identity. Like any democracy, India will probably find it easier to slouch toward disaster than to infuriate the defenders of patriarchy. Ultimately, though, unless the country finds a way to break through the encrustations of centuries of misogyny, its democracy itself could be in danger from an unmanageable excess of men.

CHAPTER 8 :
THE BIRTH STRIKE

“Feminism is the new natalism.”

—David Willetts, Tory MP

W
arsaw’s Palace of Science and Culture, built by the Soviets in the 1950s and originally named after Stalin, is the tallest building in Poland, and its tower dominates the city skyline. Inside, there’s a domed amphitheater with chairs upholstered in a rich, bright red. In May 2007 thousands of conservatives from around the world convened there for World Congress of Families IV, subtitled “The Natural Family—Springtime for Europe and the World.” The name was meant as a hopeful contrast to the ominous specter of “demographic winter,” a right-wing term for the threat of first-world population decline that has, in recent years, come to obsess conservatives worldwide and worry a great many others as well.

A cosmopolitan gathering of anticosmopolitans, this World Congress of Families brought together speakers and participants from across the globe—delegates came from France, Japan, Venezuela, Lithuania, Pakistan, and Russia, among many other places—though Americans and Poles predominated. The Bush administration sent Ellen Sauerbrey, then assistant secretary of state for population and migration. Cardinal Alfonso López Trujillo, president of the Pontifical Council for the Family, was there from the Vatican. Many Polish government leaders attended, trading ideas with their American allies. (When it was over, Ewa Sowinska, the Polish official in charge of children’s rights, asked psychologists to determine whether the children’s TV program
Teletubbies
promoted homosexuality and should be taken off the air, an idea first espoused by the late Jerry Falwell.)

There were Mormons and Catholics, Eastern Orthodox and evangelicals, even a few Muslims and Jews. Despite the incompatibility of their faiths they had agreed, mostly, to put aside their theological disputes and to unite before a greater evil, one that seemed to threaten humanity itself: low birthrates, auguring shrinking societies in the developed world. “[T]he Natural Family faces a new time of crisis,” announced meeting organizer Allan Carlson in his opening remarks. “Militant secularism would stamp out the religious and spiritual sentiments that animate the family home. Sexual radicals would twist and distort the procreative act, turning it away from the creation of new life. Neo-Malthusians would accelerate the disappearance of nations and the depopulation of the earth.”

In this context, people at the World Congress of Families hailed Poland as a bulwark against the degenerate, self-indulgent, and dying cultures to the west. “If Europe goes much of the world will go with it,” said a World Congress of Families statement. “Almost alone, Poland has maintained strong faith and strong families, though even Poland comes under severe pressure to change. Poland has saved Europe before. It is likely she will save Europe again.”
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Conservative Polish president Lech Kaczyński, who served as the conference’s honorary patron, sent a representative to give a speech celebrating his country “as a place of strong faith and strong families” on an aging continent, promising to promote “pro-family policy and pro-family mentality,” and echoing Carlson’s warnings about the “depopulation” of Europe.

Kaczyński, a former child actor turned Catholic nationalist, was elected in 2005. The next year his identical twin brother and former costar, Jaroslaw Kaczyński, became prime minister and brought the populist, ultraright League of Polish Families Party into his cabinet. For liberals this was deeply alarming: The League of Polish Families has some very unsavory associations. Its youth wing, All-Polish Youth, is named after an organization that conducted attacks on Jews in the 1930s, and in recent years members have hoisted Nazi placards at rallies.
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The League of Polish Families is deeply Catholic, militantly antiabortion, and antigay, but when I met with Krzysztof Bosak, a rising star in the party, he insisted that he’s at least as concerned with “problems of demography” as with strictly moral or religious issues. The former president of All-Polish Youth, Bosak was elected to the Polish Parliament in 2005 when he was only twenty-three. Slight and sandy-haired, dressed in jeans and a blue sweatshirt, he looked even younger. Bosak noted that Poland, along with Ukraine, is hosting Euro 2012, a European football championship. “Who will build new stadiums?” he asked. “Now there is a discussion of inviting workers from China, from India, because our young people went to England, generally, and France. We have very serious problems.”

Polish conservatives, said Bosak, are determined not to allow the kind of immigration that has reshaped populations elsewhere in Europe, making more Polish babies an imperative. “For example, when there were fights in Paris between young Muslims and police, everybody discussed them and said we don’t want to have immigration here, we don’t want to have such problems here,” he said. “People get to understand that the state should support having children.”

For the Polish right, the separation of sex from procreation leads, inevitably, to national collapse. “Europe is based on Greek culture, Roman law, and Christian values,” Roman Giertych, head of the League of Polish Families, told the
International Herald Tribune
. “If Europe abandons these values and introduces such ‘values’ as abortion, marriage for homosexuals, adoption by homosexual partners, we are heading toward a catastrophe. Without religion, without the family, without people who protect those family values in Western Europe, we will be replaced by Muslims.”
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