Thanks for the link, Steph! Very, very interesting. It could be, indeed, that people in the United States truly appreciate girls as much as they like boys, and that your country will still produce a roughly equal number of boys and girls when it becomes medically possible to pre-select the gender of one's child. If that is true about your country, then let me say that my admiration for America will increase almost exponentially. Moreover,if you manage to keep sex rates equal when people get to choose the sex of their children themselves, then you will be in my book such a shining example to the world, and such an inspiration and a bringer of hope. And I mean that, without irony.
You may know that I was raised on the Bible. Well, in the Bible there are many stories about proud mothers giving birth to sons, but, to my knowledge, only one story which even mentions the name of a woman who gave birth to a daughter. The woman in question was Leah, one of Jacob's wives, who gave birth to a daughter, Dinah. Well, Leah also had six sons, and Dinah probably gave Leah little joy, as she caused trouble for her entire family by having an unsuitable love affair. Compare that will all the stories about mothers who had important sons: Sarah gave birth to Isaac, Rebecca to Jacob, and Leah and Rachel had many important sons. Hannah was the mother of Samuel, the prophet. Elizabeth gave birth to John the Baptist, and Mary had Jesus, of course. So the Bible often celebrates a woman for having a son, but it doesn't exactly tell a woman that it is great to have a daughter.
If you read, say, ancient Greek mythology, you also don't get the impression that women are as valuable as men. I have read claims that female infanticide was common in ancient Greece. In the Bible there are more examples of "trafficking": town are raided and razed, but the young women from those towns are kidnapped and forced into marriage with Hebrew men.
Here's a link which summarizes the problem about "missing women", the excess killing of women and female infanticide:
Missing Women It is of course possible to say that none of this is true, or if it is true, it doesn't really matter. I try to argue that it is true, and that female infanticide and other forms of comparatively killings of women happen in many countries and cultures, not only China and India.
This link claims that the Romans brought female infanticide with them wherever they went and exported it to the countries which they conquered:
What the Romans did to us In other parts of the world, there are other practises which also lead to an unnaturally high mortality for women. For example, in many parts of Africa, HIV has increasingly become a women's disease:
Why We Are Failing African Girls Note that it says that African girls are sometimes raped by men who are HIV-positive, because these men believe that they themselves will be cured of the disease if they have sex with a virgin. (And of course, if these men rape a very young girl, the chances are better that she is a virgin.)
The article says that girls in Tanzania and Zambia get infected at a younger age than boys, so that three times as many girls aged 15-19 are infected as boys the same age. This must almost invariably lead to a very high mortality rate for women in these countries, because you must remember that there is no cure for AIDS, and relatively few people in Africa can afford the drugs that keep the disease under control.
Anyway, is "gender planning" for babies a problem at all? According to
this article from The Observer, clinics which offer parents the chance to select their baby's gender already exist in Great Britain and the United States:
In the United States more than 200 parents have been through the procedure, with a success rate of between 70 and 80 per cent.
There are fears that those who ask for help to select their children's gender often prefer boys:
HFEA officials told The Observer that of particular concern are claims that families with strong religious beliefs are using the technique to try to ensure male heirs rather than daughters.
(HFEA means Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority.)
But let me return to your graph, Steph. A problem with it is that it talks about children under five, rather than children under one. At two, three or four years of age, children have certainly developed a "personality", and they can be killed because of that personality. It is only when babies are close to newborn that they can be killed for their sex only.
But as far as it goes, the graph certainly suggests that there is no excessive violence against girls in America, and that American parents and American people in general value girls as highly as boys.
Ann
