Every 100 Baby Girls example essay topic
Located around the central metropolis of Shanghai, the area ranges from crowded coastal cities to surrounding rural communities, and had a population of 140 million in 1990. Their research found that the culturally 'minimal acceptable' Chinese family consisted of two boys and a girl, given China's patrilineal heritage. Daughters are important as well for household duties, marriage into a higher-status family, and the source of sons-in-law when there are no male heirs. China began trying to control its massive population growth in 1970 and introduced a one-child-per-family policy in 1980 -- an approach that ran into huge resistance and was 'relaxed' after 1986.
From 1971 to 1980, Skinner and Yuan found that 808,300 baby girls were missing, or about 8 percent of all girls born in the lower Yangtze region during the decade. About 81,800 boys, or 4.7 percent of the total, are missing, too. But Skinner and Yuan conclude that while most of the boys were adopted or 'transferred' to other families, most of the girls were killed shortly after birth. Their research was aided by the fact that the Chinese census collects a birth history from every woman under the age of 65. The data paints a stark picture. For example, 44.6 percent of all girls who were the sixth-born child in lower Yangtze families between 1971-80 are 'missing,' ' the researchers said.
At the same time, 45.4 percent of all girls born into families with four daughters are missing. The disappearance of girls has continued over time. All Yangtze-region couples with two daughters reported more than twice as many male as female births in 1989-90 when it came to baby No. 3. That's more than double the natural ratio of 104-106 baby boys born for every 100 baby girls. For couples with two daughters, the ratio shot up to 232 baby boys per 100 baby girls in 1989-90. 'We'd expect it to be 104, so more than half of those girls have been disposed of,' 's kinner said in an interview.
Many girls were abandoned at birth, he said, but the traditional method of infanticide is drowning. 'The moral of the story is that the Chinese birth-planning program has caused a major upsurge of infanticide,' 's kinner said. 'There's been terrible resistance along the way. ' 's tatistics since 1990 show that China's male-female imbalance is persisting, and there have been reports in both the Chinese and the Western press about the rise of targeted abortions of female fetuses after their sex is detected by ultrasound. In 1997, a University of Washington demographer cited statistics from a 1995 Chinese census sampling. That data reportedly showed that among 3-year-olds, there were 119 boys per 100 girls; among 2-year-olds, 121 boys; and among children less than a year old, 116 boys.