Where Chinese Girls Go
March 16th, 2010
Recently at a Chinese maternity clinic a wealthy Chinese woman asked me in a low whisper if I knew whether my wife and I were having a boy or a girl. Her short overcoat was fringed with real fur – not the fake green stuff that’s so popular in this part of China – and she and her daughter toted Luis Vuitton sacks that looked real enough. Her own daughter, tall, with the figure of a popsicle stick, was sitting just behind her, waiting her turn to see the doctor. I answered cheerily, “A boy!” The older woman leaned over to me conspiratorially, and asked, “When can you find out whether it’s a boy or a girl?” I knew immediately what she was getting at, and said quietly, “I’m really not sure what week. We only just found out ourselves, in Shanghai – at an American hospital.” She leaned back in her seat, contemplative. It was so clear to me that if her daughter was not delivering a boy, she would command the fetus aborted in a heartbeat.
Ironically, I had been reading there in the hospital lobby the issue of the Economist Magazine titled, “Gendercide: Where have all the girls gone?” Industrialized countries see a ratio of boys to girls born of about 103 to 107 boys for 100 girls. China, before the implementation of the One Child Policy, had a ratio of 106 boys to 100 girls. Come the introduction of ultrasound technology into Chinese clinics in 1986, parents would opt to abort a female fetus over a boy, since it is the male in the culture that carries on the family line. By 2005 China saw 120 boys for every 100 girls born; in Guangdong, Anhui and Qinghai provinces the number has reached as high as 130 boys for every girl. For parents who live in rural China, where the One Child Policy is more liberally applied in the event the first child born is a girl. The parents, bent on the second child being a boy, will do whatever it takes to ensure just such a result, including bribing ultrasound technicians or abandonment and even infanticide. In some villages and small towns the ratio of boys to girls is as high as 143 to 100. Despite China making it illegal for medical technicians across the country to disclose the sex of an unborn child, bribery is rife in city hospitals and country clinics, and old ways of thinking die hard.
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