One of the distinguishing features of our age is in its contempt for basic societal building blocks. There’s a new book making the rounds by Mara Hvistendahl called Unnatural Selection: Choosing Boys Over Girls, And The Consequences Of A World Full Of Men. If you’ve read the relevant bits of America Alone or some of my other columns, you’ll know what comes next: In China, India, other parts of the developing world, and those parts of the west where Chinese, Indians and others have settled in large numbers, there are plenty of boys and an ever greater absence of girls. Indeed, given the decline in sex ratios in Asia and elsewhere, if daughters had feathers or four legs, they’d be on the endangered species list.
However, as Ross Douthat points out, because Ms Hvistendahl is impeccably liberal, she can’t quite articulate the grounds of her objection to what’s going on. If you’re in favor of abortion on principle, it’s hard to object to 160 million of them per se. So it seems Ms Hvistendahl would prefer an abortion industry in which the wee male fetus gets equal time. But that’s not going to happen, not if you introduce routine abortion into the world as is, as opposed to the world liberal fantasists would like it to be. As I say below, 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.
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