In many communities, she writes, “women use their increased autonomy to select for sons,” because male offspring bring higher social status. In countries like India, sex selection began in “the urban, well-educated stratum of society,” before spreading down the income ladder.
Moreover, Western governments and philanthropic institutions have their fingerprints all over the story of the world’s missing women.
From the 1950s onward, Asian countries that legalized and then promoted abortion did so with vocal, deep-pocketed American support. Digging into the archives of groups like the Rockefeller Foundation and the International Planned Parenthood Federation, Hvistendahl depicts an unlikely alliance between Republican cold warriors worried that population growth would fuel the spread of Communism and left-wing scientists and activists who believed that abortion was necessary for both “the needs of women” and “the future prosperity — or maybe survival — of mankind,” * as the Planned Parenthood federation’s medical director put it in 1976.
***
Just a reminder:
No Army officer in Vietnam ever really said:
* “We had to destroy the village in order to save it.”
Remember: Liberals ALWAYS project their own dark daydreams onto others.
PS: My favorite part of that Dothat column? The darkly whimsical paranthetical “plop” at the very end:
“Paul Krugman is off today.”
It was like the accidental cosmic punchline.
Meanwhile, Mark Steyn comments on Dothat’s column that if all these liberals had been genuinely “multicultural,” they would have known enough about other cultures to predict the inevitable outcome of their own “do gooding”:
…in practice a “woman’s right to choose” is the right to choose not to have any women. This wasn’t an unpredictable consequence, but entirely foreseeable.
