7 ms·
Case of the Missing Women
- mlang23 7y ago"eroding the next generation's pool of women" What a way to phrase things. I really wonder how this article is relevant to HN?
- tastroder 7y ago> What a way to phrase things. I really wonder how this article is relevant to HN? There was a quite active discussion on the topic of demographics in india yesterday [0], that also contains this link as a sub-thread. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20505952 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20505952
- lrem 7y agoIt might be relevant even if we disagree with (parts of) it.
- nuwandavek 7y agoHey! I'm the author of this article. I apologise for that particular phrasing. I sincerely meant it as a pool of men, pool of women kinda way. I was trying to be dispassionate about it, which may have come across as insensitive. Apologies. I was trying to base my tone on these articles that got me thinking Economist's analysis of marriage in China : https://www.economist.com/special-report/2017/11/23/a-distorted-sex-ratio-is-playing-havoc-with-marriage-in-china https://www.economist.com/special-report/2017/11/23/a-distor... FT's article on 'missing brides' : https://www.ft.com/content/d44122c0-a435-11e5-873f-68411a84f346 https://www.ft.com/content/d44122c0-a435-11e5-873f-68411a84f...
- RaSoJo 7y agoI have a pet (non-scientific) theory/query. Wouldn't such prolonged & sustained periods of female foeticide eventually cause the human body to mutate...and stop giving birth to the female sex entirely?
- maeln 7y agoThis is not how mutation work [1]. If over several generation we "selected" women/men that "yield" more man then women (if such a thing is even coded in some genes which, as far as i know, we have no clue), we would slowly make this trait more frequent, increasing the issue. But this looks more like a bad sci-fi novel setup than something possible. [1] By that I mean: Mutation are not "created" by the environment. Evolution theory shows that we "select" mutation which will then become present in the majority of the population over several generation (provided that the mutation can be passed to offspring and yield a significant benefit that will last over several generation). Mutation happens all the time in your body, although, if i remember my high school biology class, most of them get "fixed". And mutation are only one of the many "tools" that help create diversity (chromosome recombination for example).
- bryanrasmussen 7y agoIn the same way that if you clone a bunch of male dinosaurs to populate your amusement park but eventually "life finds a way", yes. Outside of fiction - no.
- nordsieck 7y ago> I have a pet (non-scientific) theory/query. Wouldn't such prolonged & sustained periods of female foeticide eventually cause the human body to mutate...and stop giving birth to the female sex entirely? It's the opposite, actually. It is evolutionarily favorable to give birth to the sex that is less numerous at sexual maturity. If female babies started dying, for whatever reason, the chance the average baby is female would gradually increase until the ratio of sexually mature females to males balanced out. Incidentally, this is presumably why there are slightly more males born than females [1] - males tend to die more frequently than females during childhood. ___ 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_sex_ratio https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_sex_ratio > In humans, the natural ratio between males and females at birth is slightly biased towards the male sex, being estimated to be about 1.05[2] or 1.06[3] males/per female born.
- claudiawerner 7y ago>If female babies started dying, for whatever reason, the chance the average baby is female would gradually increase until the ratio of sexually mature females to males balanced out. Perhaps I'm missing something, but how does the human body have internal knowledge of the current gender ratio in society such that it will attempt to fix the ratio to balance?
- somecallitblues 7y agoThey need a solid war with Pakistan to bring things back to normal. That’s unless they send their women to fight for them.
- dang 7y agoNationalistic slurs will get you banned here. Please don't do it again. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- FearNotDaniel 7y agoThe tone of this article makes my skin crawl. It reads as if the author believes women are possessions that every man is entitled to own. Can we all start treating female humans as humans please, that is the only way that the root cause of this kind of problem will ever be eliminated.
- projektir 7y agoGenerally I'm quite sensitive to that stuff but not really seeing that with this article (besides the phrase 'pool of women' maybe). Can you give some examples?
- xanth 7y agoI'm not sure there's any way to talk about people in aggregate whilst keeping a compassionate tone.
- kixiQu 7y agoThere's definitely better ways and worse ways. All we can do is our best.
- Chris2048 7y agoCan you give examples from the article of this?
- odiroot 7y agoWell, the tone that you describe is very "evolutionary" PoV -- where everyone (young/old, man/woman) have different role in a pack of humans. It's definitely not playing nicely with our modern sensitivity.
- nuwandavek 7y agoHey! I'm the author of this article. I completely understand this criticism. I was very afraid of how this might come across. My sincere apologies for this. My intention was to highlight the effect skewed sex-ratios have on the population, as an aggregate. I abhor the thought of men acting entitled to women, and being treated as possessions. But I also wanted to highlight the impact that is already being felt in countries such as china where 'family life' is taught to be a 'truth' that every human must go through. Sorry again! Some articles that got me thinking : https://www.ft.com/content/d44122c0-a435-11e5-873f-68411a84f346 https://www.ft.com/content/d44122c0-a435-11e5-873f-68411a84f... https://www.economist.com/special-report/2017/11/23/a-distorted-sex-ratio-is-playing-havoc-with-marriage-in-china https://www.economist.com/special-report/2017/11/23/a-distor...
- lota-putty 7y agoMake all Indian women more independent and self-reliant. - They often don't have a say in choosing a life-partner - They're often don't have a say in pursuing higher studies Public(free) health/education is utmost importance. Even most Govt. primary school teachers send their kids to private schools, others don't have private schools near by. These issues are not black/white like most microbial diseases. India is a democracy; democracies are flawed coz, like everywhere else power attracts corrupt people; and corrupt fight bloody. Does health of NGOs in a country and their ability to influence Govt. policies within a term(4-5yrs) tells us more about a Country?
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- odiroot 7y ago> - They often don't have a say in choosing a life-partner Do men have? Two of my (male) Indian coworkers had their wives selected for them by their parents, even though they were working abroad.
- whenanother 7y agothis is a hit piece. it is likely that they either manipulated the time period in which the data was taken or they cherry picked the towns the took the data from. most likely they did both. with a population of over a billion. it is easy to manipulate population numbers. what they did is find towns with only one or two births for a given time period and selected a time period that would push their narrative. the other possibility is that these towns have some messed laws that encourages people to not register their daughter’s birth. this is an issue in many countries and people just ignore these rules and just register their kids in the most beneficial way. of course racist people will take this and claim misogyny. there is a logical disconnect of people stereotyping countries with the largest population as mistreating females. the lack of critical thinking is appalling. it takes nearly a year to birth a child and requires that the female is a willing participant. they have done this more times in india than in most other countries.
- em-bee 7y ago
- yread 7y agoThere was some discussion about this issue 10 years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=651028 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=651028
- electricBugalu 7y agoAbortion is abortion, no? Isn't it their body, their choice? Why does abortion get a special different word like foeticide in this case? If the mother chooses to end the pregnancy, aren't we cherry picking if and when it becomes right or wrong if we ban special cases of abortion?
- tokai 7y agoYou are presuming that the women of India get to choose.
- humanrebar 7y agoThen foeticide is the wrong word, right? It should be uterian assault or something since the woman is the victim in that perspective.
- rrrazdan 7y agoBut if they do? As a society we ban egregious practices so that society as a whole can be healthier.
- dsfyu404ed 7y agoIf you have an abortion because it's the cultural expectation and everyone around you is telling you it's the right thing to do is it your choice? If not, then a heck of a lot of high-shcool and college age women in the west aren't choosing either.
- sbmthakur 7y agoSome do while some don't. It isn't foetecide if the woman is willingly aborting. I guess that's the point the parent is making.
- concert-gilled 7y agofoeticide (ˈfiːtɪˌsaɪd) n (Gynaecology & Obstetrics) a variant spelling of feticide fe·ti·cide (fē′tĭ-sīd′) n. Intentional destruction of a human fetus. Isn't the intentional destruction of a human fetus what an abortion is?
- linuxftw 7y agoIt's just people reacting to market conditions. If your society provides incentives for abortion, abortion is going to happen. I can't judge people living in other parts of the world. But I know that massive populations ruled by a single government don't work. There's no reason 1/6 of the world should be under the control of a single government. They need to decentralize and maybe create a federation of independent states.
- billfruit 7y agoI see some problems in India with the allocation of seats in the upper house of the parliament split unequally among the states, unlike the senate in the USA. That means states with more population have a bigger say, rather than having all states having an equal say.
- dragonwriter 7y ago“Fails to be as anti-democratic as the remaining remnant of the US Constitutional design to protect slavery” is an odd criticism of another government’s structure...but okay.