The San Jose Mercury News has an article highlighting some soon-to-be-published findings by economists at both Columbia University and the University of Texas who were studying Asian immigrant communities. The findings indicate that the practice of sex selection among Asian immigrants does not stop at American shores as many of us would like to believe:
Researchers are finding the first evidence that some Asian immigrant families are using U.S. medical technology to have sons instead of daughters, apparently acting on an age-old cultural prejudice that has led to high ratios of boys to girls in parts of China and India.
The new research, produced by independent teams of economists who arrived at similar conclusions, focused on Indian, Chinese and Korean families who first had girls and then used modern technology to have a son…For some South Asian couples, having a boy is a “status symbol,” said Deepka Lalwani of Milpitas, the founder and president of Indian Business & Professional Women, a nonprofit business support network. “If a woman has male children, she feels in her family, certainly with her in-laws, that her status will go up because now she is the mother of a male child…”
Such cultural pressures may explain the recent findings. A Columbia University study suggests that Chinese, Indian and Korean immigrants have been using medical technology, most likely including abortion, to assure their later children were boys. And a soon-to-be published analysis of birth records by a University of Texas economist estimates there were 2,000 “missing girls” between 1991 and 2004 among immigrant families from China and India living in the U.S. — children never born because their parents chose to have sons instead. [Link]
Perhaps I’ve just been very naive but I was quite surprised by this finding. Given that the prime reason for preferring sons in Asian countries is that sons serve as a social security net, I just assumed the practice would be swept aside in America given that there are alternate means of obtaining social security and that women here have a greater ability to rise up the socio-economic ladder and support the family. I guess I did not put enough importance in the desire some of these families have to preserve their names through a male heir.
Among Indian families in Santa Clara County in the 1990s, Texas economist Jason Abrevaya found a 58 percent chance of having a son among families that first had two girls — significantly higher than the natural 51 percent chance of having a boy.
The teams found no comparable bias toward boys among white, black and Japanese-American families that first had girls…Abrevaya found evidence that female infanticide, a practice documented in India and China, is not happening in the U.S. The economists’ data indicates only that some couples have manipulated the natural odds of having a son or daughter; it does not identify the means they used to do it.
”If gender-selective abortion is the cause for the unusual Asian Indian boy birth ratios, then the abortion rate would be 20 to 25 percent of female fetuses who otherwise would have been the family’s third or fourth child,” Abrevaya said… [Link]
One of the main techniques that parents are using to boost the odds of having a male child is something called preimplantation genetic diagnosis (PGD). In this technique the doctor harvests fertilized embryos after identifying their sex and then implants them into the womb.
Some who study the Indian diaspora say son-selection may not die out, even in the U.S. Abrevaya, who found much stronger evidence for son-selection among Indians than among Chinese living in the U.S., worries that as PGD becomes less expensive, more people will use it. [Link]
That was the other fact the surprised me. Indian immigrants are more likely to hang on this practice than Chinese immigrants.
Preeti Shekar, a Berkeley-based journalist and activist who believes there are “sexist and racist consequences” to medical technologies like PGD, has urged a petition campaign to stop the ethnic media from running ads [for PGD]
One San Jose doctor received angry letters after he ran ads in India Currents magazine promoting “sex preselection” services.
Dr. Suresh Nayak uses a technique that selects sperm before conception to greatly increase the odds of having a child of the chosen gender. Nayak did not respond to telephone calls from the San Jose Mercury News, but highlights those services on his Web site. [Link]
Nayak’s logic for offering this technique doesn’t pass the ethical sniff test for me:
“Being in the obstetrics-gynecology field, I see a fair number of couples terminating pregnancies of the ‘undesired sex’ after doing ultrasounds and amniocentesis,” Nayak wrote. “There would be fewer couples doing that if these same couples used the Ericsson method of sex selection…” [Link]
Even though Abrevaya’s paper isn’t out yet I did find a previous paper by him
on the same topic in case anyone is interested in the data.
