The real history and nature of population control

C-Fam: Mara Hvistendahl’s findings in Unnatural Selection: Choosing Boys Over Girls and the Consequences of a World Full of Men buck conventional wisdom. She refutes the idea that sex selection is about poverty. It is the wealthy—like Delhi’s most prestigious hospitals and clientele—who initiate the practice, while the general population sadly follows suit. 

. . . Son preference, per se, is not the main cause. Rather, the rise of abortion and fertility control—in countries of diverse cultural practices from Azerbaijan to China—are the common thread.

Hvistendahl draws from Matthew Connelly’s 2008 history of population control to show how population advocates saw compound benefits of culling the number of potential mothers. In one example, she painstakingly tracks money, medical technology, and Malthusian ideas from the West to India, where the Army and elite government-backed physicians inculcated the rest of the nation’s doctors. The Rockefeller Foundation, International Planned Parenthood Federation, Population Council, and most of all the Ford Foundation, invested in spreading sex selection.

She also indicts the Republican establishment as well. US Army general William Draper . . . saw too little time for a “sustained educational effort” about family planning and found abortion more practical anyway: it was easier for operatives to spot a pregnant woman than one considering conception.

. . . The paucity of marriageable females has diminished, not enhanced, women’s status. . . . Hvistendahl shatters the myth that feminists defend women against such abuse. To the contrary, she finds a conspiracy of silence.