The New York Times Magazine ran an article on a sad and chronic problem in the developing world: the preference people have for sons over daughters, and the lengths they will go to in order to ensure that they have sons. The scary part is that the situation is made worse, not better, by improved living standards. Newly affluent and educated Indians can pay for ultrasounds to determine a fetus’s gender, and then have a safe abortion if it is a girl – much less messy than drowning a newborn! These emerging middle-class families feel pressure to ensure that their sons have good educations and medical care, and they figure that a suitable marriage for a daughter will involve a high dowry. Even though the family’s resources may be growing, the boy will need to take a larger share of them. There simply won’t be enough for some pathetic creature cursed with two X chromosomes.

The ridiculousness of parents who would love a child less – to the point of murder – because of secondary sex characteristics is bad enough. But there’s an additional reason to fear gender selection: what to do with the excess men. This is a new phenomenon in human history. For most of our eons of existence, humans have suffered from a shortage of men. Male babies tend to be weaker, and then men would die while hunting or during wars. That’s why human beings took up polygamy. It was purely practical: a man would take in the nice widow lady a few caves down as a way of supporting the community as a whole. Naturally, the rich men would end up with more, younger, and prettier wives than the average fellow, but the surplus of women meant that there were wives for every man who wanted one, or two, or three. (more…)