Mara Hvistendahl

Mara Hvistendahl looks at the consequences of sex selection in China and at Western complicity with the policies. The port city Lianyungang has China's most extreme gender ratio for children under four: 163 boys for every 100 girls. In ten years, the skewed sex ratio will pose a colossal challenge—historically, eras in which there have been an excess of men have produced periods of violent conflict and instability. In Unnatural Selection: Choosing Boys over Girls and the Consequences of a World Full of Men she shows how gender imbalance reaches far beyond Asia, affecting Georgia, Eastern Europe, and cities in the U.S. where there are significant immigrant populations, and she examines how this mismatch is likely to create profound social upheaval.

India’s population has tripled in size in the last 50 years, hitting a record 1.2 billion in 2010. India is set to outpace China by 2030, even though the population growth is slowing. But the data has a disturbing side, the ratio of boys to girls has dropped again. For every 1,000 boys only 914 girls are born. The gender imbalance is a result of sex selection, and may have far-reaching adverse effects for the country.