Unnatural Selection: Choosing Boys Over Girls, and the Consequences of a World Full of Men

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Unnatural Selection: Choosing Boys Over Girls, and the Consequences of a World Full of Men

by Mara Hvistendahl (Goodreads Author)

3.83 of 5 stars 3.83 · rating details · 448 ratings · 134 reviews

Finalist for the Pulitzer Prize

A Slate Best Book of 2011

A Discover Magazine Best Book of 2011

Lianyungang, a booming port city, has China's most extreme gender ratio for children under four: 163 boys for every 100 girls. These numbers don't seem terribly grim, but in ten years, the skewed sex ratio will pose a colossal challenge. By the time those children reach adulthood,...more

Hardcover, 336 pages

Published June 7th 2011 by PublicAffairs

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Jul 25, 2012 Dreamybee rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

This book is making me stabby! Every few pages I have to set it down and make some out-loud remarks about the whole f-ed up situation and how it got that way. The fact that I'm usually alone probably makes me look a little crazy, but at least I haven't been reading in public!

A few quotes(to explain the stabbiness):

"Between January 1981, shortly after the [one-child] policy was introduced, and December 1986, Chinese women underwent 67 million abortions." (p.147)

"Mao Zedong once said that women ho...more This book is making me stabby! Every few pages I have to set it down and make some out-loud remarks about the whole f-ed up situation and how it got that way. The fact that I'm usually alone probably makes me look a little crazy, but at least I haven't been reading in public!

A few quotes(to explain the stabbiness):

"Between January 1981, shortly after the [one-child] policy was introduced, and December 1986, Chinese women underwent 67 million abortions." (p.147)

"Mao Zedong once said that women hold up half the sky, and until I moved to China I believed it....It was only after I moved to China to work as a journalist...that I started to dwell on the societal implications of a population with tens of millions more men than women....I didn't understand it. But it was clear the sky was sagging." (p. xi, xiii)

"Women might have to be locked up, or forced to marry multiple men, or traded like commodities, but sex selection [choosing boy babies over girl babies] was advisable, he suggested, for 'the only really important problem facing humanity to-day is over-population,' particularly in 'under-developed unenlightened communities.'" (p.103)

During his first night of rounds as a medical student in India in 1978, Dr. Bedi recalls seeing a stray cat run past him with an aborted fetus in its mouth. "He told a nurse, then a doctor. Or maybe it was a doctor, then a nurse. I saw a cat eat a fetus. Nobody on duty seemed concerned, however, and finally he got on with his post...But then finally he worked up the nerve to approach the head doctor with the mystery. Why had he seen a cat run off with what looked like fetal matter? And why had the fetus not been disposed of more carefully? Bedi says the nurse's explanation came out cold, her voice matter-of-fact. 'Because it was a girl,' she said." (p.79-80)

In the 1970s, researchers discovered that a baby's sex could be determined through amniocentesis testing. At a hospital in China, doctors reported that out of 100 attempts, they had successfully determined the sex of 93 fetuses. "Of the ninety-three women who had their fetus's sex determined, thirty chose to abort. Of those thirty, twenty-nine were carrying girls." (p12)

I started this book with a pre-conceived attitude of, "Way to go, China," but the problem of skewed sex ratios (number of boys to number of girls) is so much more widespread than just China, and, as it turns out, the U.S. and other Western nations had a pretty heavy hand in setting all this into motion.

I know it sounds like this book has the potential to be agenda-heavy regarding abortion, and there is a lot (A LOT) of talk about, abortion since it is the primary method used to get rid of unwanted girl children, but abortion itself is not really the issue. Whether you're for or against it, the problem goes a lot deeper than just whether abortion should be legal, and, so far, the author has done a pretty good job of staying neutral on the topic. (less)

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Dec 30, 2012 Reece Thompson rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Unnatural Selection is a great book with some flaws that I would like to quickly enumerate: Hvistendahl cites a wide variety of sources, but seems reliant on only one or two sources for a single topic. Sometimes, both sources are articles written by herself. She criticizes scaremongering authors who raised public awareness for the perceived threat of overpopulation when her own prose suffers from a melodramatic bent at points, especially since I think her description of 'the consequences of a wo...more

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Jan 19, 2012 Christina rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

160 million -- that's how many missing women there are in Asia due to sex-selection abortion. This book was fascinating to read, though quite flawed in some of its premises and conclusions.

Interestingly enough, the phenomenon is not happening in most Asian countries when a couple has their first child -- the first children ratios are largely normal. It's when a second child is born that a family decides that "this time, we want a boy." (p. 43). Falling birthrates in all of these countries mean m...more 160 million -- that's how many missing women there are in Asia due to sex-selection abortion. This book was fascinating to read, though quite flawed in some of its premises and conclusions.

Interestingly enough, the phenomenon is not happening in most Asian countries when a couple has their first child -- the first children ratios are largely normal. It's when a second child is born that a family decides that "this time, we want a boy." (p. 43). Falling birthrates in all of these countries mean more pressure on parents to have their "ideal family" that consists of at least one boy.

China, Korea, India and most Asian countries have a cultural preference for boy children. As much as the author tries to downplay the cultural part of the phenomenon by pointing out that a few Western countries -- Armenia and Georgia, for example, also select for boys, and then pointing to all the factors that went into the encouragement of abortion as a means of population control, the fact remains that when given the "choice," mothers and fathers are aborting their female children by the millions. The author's "it's not cultural" argument really breaks down when you consider that she even presents that Asians living in America are not only more likely to have abortions than American women generally, they also "select" for boys while Americans don't -- 35% of Asian-American pregnancies end in abortion, twice that of whites. Their sex selection rates are about right for first children, 117 boys to girls for second children, and 151 for third children. (p.43-44)

In parts of China today, the ratios are especially skewed. Where naturally, 105 boys are born for every 100 girls, in the city Lianyungang, there are 163 boys for every 100 girls. In Yichan, there are 137. In Fangchenggang, 153, and in Tianmen, 176. (p. 23)

But while the author's argument against culture falls flat, there is no doubt that Western arm-twisting and the population alarmists absolutely were involved heavily in promoting and encouraging abortion as a means of reducing the population "threat." The chapters on how horribly and unethically their tactics were are eye-opening and disgusting. South Korea's "don't have children" campaign was especially coercive and also effective -- by 1977, there were 2.75 abortions in that country for every live birth (p. 133). Today, South Korea is about the only country in Asia that DOESN'T have an abnormal birth ratio of boys to girls, but the author points out that the change is largely because South Korean's aren't having babies at all -- their birthrate has fallen incredibly low, to 1.6 children per woman.

As the author points out in detail in country after country, Western NGOs (Planned Parenthood, the UNFPA) and others put pressure on Asian countries to reduce their populations anyway they can. China jumped on the bandwagon especially hard, introducing their "one child" policy in the late 70s. By 1982, 40% of pregnancies in China ended in abortion, many of them forced. Funding from IPPF (international planned parenthood) only increased in China, and a student at Stanford who tried to bring attention to the forced abortions happening was expelled. (p. 144-145). To the population control people, fewer babies born was a great outcome, and it didn't matter what methods were used to reduce the population.

Some of the consequences of the Asian world where men largely outnumber women were explored and the consequences for women's rights and a civil society is devastating -- bride-buying, sex trafficing, girls kidnapped and sold into prostitution, men unable to find wives, poorer countries being emptied of their women who migrate (by choice or not, many of them sold by their families) to richer countries, etc. I haven't read the Bare Branches book referenced by the author here, but I found her dismissive attitude towards its conclusions (that a young, unattached male population is a security threat/war waiting to happen) interesting in light of the other problems she is showing are already happening. I would expect that premise explored in depth.

Sex-selection is an issue that is largely ignored by the left, as the author laments (along with an attack on the right for using it as a tool to fight abortion -- hmmm, you think?). The author is very, very careful throughout the book to keep her liberal street cred -- using sanitized terms like "sex selection" and "selected" rather than "terminated" or "killed," but the fact remains that in a culture where killing an unborn baby is not considered a real death, the fact that women use their "choice" to kill female babies in astounding rates is very embarrassing for the feminist movement. And mentioning the downsides of pro-choice is very dicey to discuss. The author suggests that maybe in the future, the left could frame the debate around issues of the health problems caused by multiple late-term abortions rather than bringing up the morality of abortion. After all, the implication is, abortion isn't wrong; it's just these pesky consequences of its availability.

One of the most telling paragraphs (and bold for the author) in the book was this one: "Trepidation about the 'A-word,' however, has also immobilized the very people who should be crying oppression. Longtime gender activist Gita Sen recently told a journalist, 'The biggest danger, which is the one we're dealing with right now, is that the anti-sex selection campaigns not turn into an anti-abortion campaigns.' One might respond that the biggest danger we are facing is a dramatic reduction in the number of women and girls -- that sex trafficking, bride buying, and general instability, when they arrive all at once, amount to one whopping danger In a world in which women are unnaturally scarce, the right to abort will be the least of our worries."(less)

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Dec 17, 2011 David rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: random-non-fiction, social-issues

This is a fascinating, well-written, and dare I say "must-read" book. There are 160 million Asian women missing, as Hvistendahl puts it. This is more women than live in the entire United States. The culprit, she argues, is sex-selective abortion.

She documents how as technologies such as ultrasound made their way into places like China, South Korea, and India people were able to choose to abort a baby if they did not want the gender. To put it more bluntly, mostly they wanted boys so if it was a...more

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Aug 31, 2011 Kiersten rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

This book brought a very interesting, very troubling problem to light, but I had some major problems with it. First of all, I felt like Hvistendahl spent a huge amount of time trying to say that cultural practices and gender preference in Asian countries (mostly--some eastern European countries as well, she made that point very clear) was NOT the overall cause of skewed gender ratios, that instead technological advancements and the imposition of western population controls were the cause. Howeve...more

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Aug 16, 2011 Marya rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: adult-nonfiction

Hvistendahl is a good journalist who vividly paints the whole sordid backstory of Western complicity in Asian sex selection practices (usually abortion, and usually coerced). She also takes theorists to task for their portrayal of sex selection as an exclusively Asian practice that has to do with Asian culture. When the same problem is happening in places as far flung as Albania and Georgia (the country), something other than "local customs" has to be the culprit. The pattern that emerges is a d...more

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Aug 16, 2011 Danny rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

I wanted to like this more than I did. On the one hand, Hvistendahl identifies a startling phenomenon, widespread sex-selective abortion, that raises a host of troubling ethical and practical issues. She is to be credited for bringing these issues to light.

But I found her analysis of the origins of the problem a bit simplistic, discounting cultural preferences for male children and focusing instead on technological changes and external pressures to lower overall fertility. They're all part of th...more

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Oct 15, 2011 Jeff Scott rated it 2 of 5 stars

Shelves: non-fiction, abortion

Mara Hvistenfahl makes the claim, resting on cultural history and western technology, that there are millions of women missing from the world because of abortion and sex selection.

I'm not convinced that selective abortion is the culprit here. Although the author points out ultrasounds are cheap, abortions are not. One could afford a cheap ultrasound, but a cheap abortion often kills. That aspect isn't addressed.

The book goes on to connect historical cultural trends, population control efforts,...more

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Oct 12, 2011 Katherine rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

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Mar 06, 2013 Tamlynem rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

While I was reading this book, a woman with a baby who was sitting next to me on the metro asked me if I liked it. "I went to school with that author," she said. I told her that it was a pick for pro-choice book club and I was interested in the topic because a Discovery magazine article I'd read from last year (written by a dude b/t/w) said that women were more "valued" in places where they were scarce.
The author pretty much refutes that assertion, arguing that in places where women are scarce t...more

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Jun 01, 2012 Caroline rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: politics

This was an immensely sobering read, about a problem that still remains somewhat hidden - that of 'sex selection' and the immense gender imbalance it is leading to. The rise of cheap, mobile and reliable ultrasound and abortion technologies has lead to a massive rise in the numbers of parents aborting foetuses simply because they want boys, not girls - a rough number bandied about is 160 'missing' women.

The problems seems to largely arise in developing nations such as India, China and the rest o...more This was an immensely sobering read, about a problem that still remains somewhat hidden - that of 'sex selection' and the immense gender imbalance it is leading to. The rise of cheap, mobile and reliable ultrasound and abortion technologies has lead to a massive rise in the numbers of parents aborting foetuses simply because they want boys, not girls - a rough number bandied about is 160 'missing' women.

The problems seems to largely arise in developing nations such as India, China and the rest of Asia, countries that some might argue haven't yet caught up 'progressively', although worryingly it seems to be spreading to Eastern Europe. Women hold a much lower status in these countries than in the West, and parents want boys for a variety of reasons, for status, to carry on the family name, to support them in their old age. Girls are not valued, so female foetuses are discard in the quest for a boy.

A lot of this stems from Western-sponsored population control endeavours - the argument was that families would keep trying for sons, leading to largue numbers of children. Why not eliminate that problem by allowing them to have sons right off the bat, with no need for all those surplus unwanted girls clogging up the population? Many of these countries now face massive gender imbalances - put simply, there are not enough women to go around.

Some scientists claim that the law of supply and demand would mean what women there were would be more highly regarded and their status would rise accordingly. To me, that argument demeans women even more - as though women were a commodity to be possessed! Simply being 'fortunate' to possess one of these rare prizes doesn't necessary mean they'd be treated any better - indeed, they're even more likely to be guarded and restricted and deprived of freedom and choice. Many countries indeed have resorted to sex trafficking, to bought brides and forced marriages, particularly China and Taiwan.

There are also societal issues regarding millions of young single men with no outlet for their aggression and sex drive. Studies have proved that single men are inherently more violent and aggressive than married men - married men demonstrate significantly lower levels of testosterone. And China in particular is rather worried about the destabilising effect of millions of young angry men with no prospect of marriage or family in their futures.

The difficulty in controlling this issue is that it has become politicised, caught up in the anti-abortion debate and it splits women's rights organisations down the middle. How can one argue against sex-selection abortion without lending strength to the anti-abortion organisations? How can women's rights groups argue against something that ostensibly supports women's rights?

This doesn't seem to be an issue affecting the West (yet), although one could quite rightly argue that a worldwide gender imbalance is everyone's problem! However, America sex-selects too, not on the same scale and ironically in America girls seem more desirable than boys. But as Hvistendahl argues, how long before the desire for the perfect child turns into selecting for more than just sex? Eye colour, hair colour, complexion, intelligence - it's already possible.(less)

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Oct 18, 2012 Wise_owl rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: non-fiction

Taking a holistic approach to a contentious topic, Unnatural Selection examines the problem of societies(Principally in Asia, but also in some regions of 'Eastern Europe') that have growing gender imbalances as a consequence of population control programs and sex determination technology. Tracing the path of these developes not to some reductionist notion of culture, Hvistendahl delves into the history of population control in the west, it's connection to programs and anti-communist activities d...more

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Jul 03, 2011 Caren rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: adult-nonfiction

This is a thoroughly researched, well-written expose on the current preponderance of males in some Asian and Eastern European countries. The author ties this current trend to the hysteria in the West in the late 1960s and 1970s over overpopulation, and to the ways in which international organizations, funded by the West, interfered in the fertility of Asian countries, leading to some of this imbalance. The book is so well-laid out, it felt as though I were following a criminal case, with each bi...more

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Jul 04, 2011 Alison L. rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: china

When I was 16 I met a little girl in a poor Yunnan village whose mother had been kidnapped and trafficked up to northern China as a wife. It was especially memorable in that she told me so matter-of-factly. Stories like that are not uncommon, as are the tropes of preference for male babies in a patriarchal semi-Confucian society, middle-aged Chinese women haunted by three or four abortions, and poor countryside families having multiple children trying for sons while educated urbanites seem conte...more

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Aug 16, 2011 Jess rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

I generally ignore the recommendations printed on a book's cover but every one of the glowing reviews for this one was spot on. This was the best work of non-fiction I've read in a while. That's not a back-handed compliment, I love non-fiction about any subject as long as it's accessible and well written. Every once in a while though, a fascinating subject intersects with a writer who could make watching paint dry seem interesting, this is one of those books. Hvistandahl's passionate interest in...more

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Aug 28, 2011 Kirsten rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition Recommends it for: Minneapolis Star Tribune

Shelves: current-events, 2011, non-fiction, science, women

I found this to be a really well researched book on a difficult subject. I'm sure there was some bias involved given that the author was a woman raised by two women, but other than that, I think she does a good job.

Predominantly this book is about Asia and the fact that sex selective abortion is being practiced in many countries that desire a son to carry on ancestor traditions, etc. Many people in the 1960s and 70s thought this was a great idea, because it reduced populations by giving parents...more

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Sep 01, 2012 Lindsey rated it 2 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: reallyism

Disappointing book about an interesting issue. The author pretty much blames the west for pushing population control and technology on the countries in question. While I do think the first world's desire to control population in other parts of the world is detrimental, the author seriously downplays the impact the culture has on the desire for boys. Her solution seems to be to limit access and crack down on ultrasound technology, and punish sex-selective abortions. Awful conclusion, when she her...more

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Oct 04, 2011 Stephanie rated it 4 of 5 stars

Have you thought about gender ratios? Untampered with, the gender ratio tends to be 105:100; 105 boys are born for every 100 girls. Eventually, that ratio tends to even out since boys are more likely to meet untimely deaths. Nature has it all figured out.

Now, in many developing countries, that ratio is heavily skewed toward boys. In one province in China, the ratio is 163:100. Most cultures favor male children. Where do the missing girls go? It's true that many are left exposed to the elements t...more

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Mar 13, 2013 Ellen rated it 1 of 5 stars · review of another edition

I was very excited to read this book, but very disappointed. The topic is very important, but the research is shoddy, to say the least. Full of unsupported assertions. Things like labeling concerns about overpopulation "overpopulation hysteria." Whose to say that those concerns were not (and are not) well-founded, just because the author say its hysterical? Attempts to turn a challenging social situation into a big Western conspiracy really do not hold water. And much of what she hypes into her...more

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Jan 05, 2012 Anne Gray rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: history, non-fiction

The loss of 163 million women who might have otherwise been born in Asia in the last generation may or may not be a disaster on the same level as a major plague for the world, but it will definitely be a personal disaster for millions of men who are unable to find wives, and at least thousands of girls and women who are kidnapped or otherwise sold as brides or into prostitution to satisfy those who can afford to use money to close the breach.

Hvistendahl does a great job mapping out the history o...more

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Feb 22, 2013 K. Bird rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Another name for this book could be "lost girls-- how technology brought selective abortion to Asia and Eastern Europe."

In this book, Hvistendahl does a marvelous job of taking you on the journey of how US foreign policy and technological development in fertility combined with various political climates to produce easily available ultrasound technology leading towards sex selection in some societies. The main ones she chronicles are China, India, and South Korea.

There are some regions, now, that...more

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Jun 25, 2012 Michael rated it 1 of 5 stars

Shelves: conspiracy, theory, abortion

This was a terrible book. It's broken into three sections of five chapters each. The first section reveals to the reader that there are countries and cultures that have a gender imbalance in the form of more boys born than girls. She spends a lot of time trying to convince us of this but there's really no reason to spend so much time on it.

After that the book goes down hill as she rapidly devolves into conspiracy theories that The West is encouraging sex selective abortions. Her evidence is ver...more

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Oct 09, 2012 James Trent rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Hvistendahl writes a disturbing book, but one that social policy planners should read. She demonstrates how concerns in the 1950s and 1960s for over-population, especially in Asian countries, led Western officials to condition the distribution of foreign aid to these countries' success in dropping their birth rates. In several Asians countries pressure, explicit in some cases and implicit in other cases, led to one-child only policies. An unintended consequence of these policies has been the use...more

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Jan 28, 2012 Alexis rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: non-fiction

This book has a split personality. It proposes to talk about the current state of sex-selective abortion and uneven gender distribution. But I felt far too much of the book was about how that state came about. Not only do I not think it's important enough to take up page space that should have been devoted to what's happening _right now_ but it really deserves it's own book _and_ I found much of her writing about it specious. In other words, not only is it not of paramount importance that the We...more This book has a split personality. It proposes to talk about the current state of sex-selective abortion and uneven gender distribution. But I felt far too much of the book was about how that state came about. Not only do I not think it's important enough to take up page space that should have been devoted to what's happening _right now_ but it really deserves it's own book _and_ I found much of her writing about it specious. In other words, not only is it not of paramount importance that the West might have played a role in the spread of sex-selective abortion, but I find the way she makes the point labored and misleading. Before I give examples of the type of thing I'm critical of, I should make it clear I think the story of the West's policies and history of population control for other parts of the world is horrifying and fascinating. I just think she made a mistake in devoting so much of the book to it while not actually presenting a coherent account of it.

Page 69: She is talking about how economic policies created by Britain in India made it advantageous not to have daughters. "The choice these families made, to kill rather than accept deiminished status, was hardly noble [...] it was only after the practice was combined with unfair economic policies that INdians began killing girls in large numbers."
She is trying to explain that female infanticide came about because of recent rapidly-evolving situations and is not part of the country's tradition. (Indeed, just last month I saw a caption for a video about sex-selective abortion in India on Yahoo News which read: "A tradition outlawed decades ago still drives families to unspeakable acts." So her concern seems valid. Of course, British rule began over 150 years ago in India, and 150 years, to an American mind, is plenty old enough for a practice to be considered a tradition. But maybe this is a minor quibble.) And yet what she ends up doing is arguing that Indians should basically be absolved of blame! Yes, clearly the people making it economically advantageous to kill girls are the real monsters here and not, you know, the people actually doing it. Talk about white man's burden . . .

Page 81: She quotes a worker involved in sex-selective abortion who says, "'This may not be acceptable to persons in the West'" and goes on to say "--their logic was a variation on Malthusianism, which India inherited from Europe."
Not only does she dismiss the idea that some Indians may actually have thought this through and be okay with it--I guess they are just gullible or brainwashed victims with no agency--but also apparently no one is allowed to be concerned about population control size without being a patsy of colonialism. And isn't "inheriting Malthusianism" a bit like inheriting the theory of evolution?

Page 128: She gives a 13th century Chinese parable "warning doctors and midwives against performing abortions." This is interesting and good evidence if she were making the point that casual attitudes to abortion were not native to China. But the way the author writes the chapter ending clearly means to indicate that convincing Chinese women to aborth _must_ have entailed force and was wrought upon ghe country by the US. Somehow it doesn't occur to her that moral commentary against something necessarily means that it exists: if there were never an acceptance of abortion then why would there be a parable warning against it? And nevermind that _many_ countries have cultures where miscarriages are bad and lots of children are good, as she gives examples of in China, but women still choose to have abortions.

There are a number of other examples I didn't write down. Some seemed too small to quibble over and yet someone not reading the book critically might think the author had made a point she hadn't really. This is a phenomenal book and I just think it's a shame that so many non-fiction books get ruined by overblown debate tactics so that they can make headlines.(less)

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May 24, 2012 Covingtoncat73 rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: excellent-non-fiction

This is a good, important book. I docked a point because I do think the author left the chauvinism of the cultures in Asia where this is the biggest problem off the hook too much. No solutions are presented. How do we keep our reproductive rights and prevent the problems of gender imbalance?

In all fairness, that is probably beyond the author's scope. I think there are too many of us (I also reject the author's implication that we in the west were wrong to worry about that. We are at 7 billion a...more

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Apr 03, 2012 Anne Marie rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

This book is very hard to read because it is horrifying. It is overwhelming to me that people on such a grand scale are choosing to have boys over girls (by killing the girls basically in womb or just after birth). As a woman, I cannot believe that there are parts of the world where women are valued so little. There is a quote from an Asian man in there where he basically says - we dreamed of an all-boy utopia, but then we realized we still need the women to help produce the boys. Crazy people!...more

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Aug 07, 2012 Kate Saetang rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

This book felt like a long and informative magazine article. I've read about gender imbalances in the NYTimes, and was interested in the causes and proposed solutions. This book posits that family planning efforts by Western organizations in the 70s-90s fueled developing countries' governments to inadvertently support sex selective abortion. This was an interesting and somewhat convincing argument, but ultimately her argument didn't lie on any evidence that was very persuasive. I think the book...more

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Feb 27, 2012 Tina rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Very interesting read. I heard about sex selection before, but had no idea how long it was around and what the implications are. Also, the knee-jerk reaction is to simply blame patriarchal societies for chosing boys over girls. Not so simple.

Western Popluation Control groups encouraged small families, and introduced cheap, easy assessible abortions - along with sex selection via ultrasounds. Traditional Eastern cultures stress the need for boys for many cultural reasons. But they still kept thei...more

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Mar 03, 2013 Dayla rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: early-republic, history, sacred-beliefs

If I knew this book was out there about the history of abortions, and why millions of girls are missing, I would set everything else aside (even eating) and read this book.

I have always felt that by saying one is "pro-choice" (which I am) almost always leads people preclude one is also "pro-abortion," (which I am not). I think that whatever a woman does with the knowledge that she is pregnant, is between that woman, her doctor and God.

This book illuminates the horrors of what happens when the...more

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Oct 04, 2012 Christina Dudley rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Riveting and disturbing investigation of the 160 million "missing" women--Fetuses aborted after modern technology made sex selection possible. Had no idea of the American role in driving down population in Asian countries, tying aid money to population reduction measures that sometimes resulted in coercive sterilization and abortions!

The author shies away from blaming cultural forces that favor boys, yet also says Asian cultures favored boys even before Americans got involved. Sounds like everyo...more

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About Mara Hvistendahl

Mara Hvistendahl is an award-winning writer and journalist specialized in the intersection of science, culture, and policy. A correspondent for Science magazine, she has also written for Harper’s, Scientific American, Popular Science, The Financial Times, and Foreign Policy, among other publications. Proficient in both Spanish and Chinese, she has spent half of the past decade in China, where she...more

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title link	preview: Unnatural Selection: Choosing Boys Over Girls, and the Consequences of a World Full of Men
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BBCode	[url=https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/10281923-unnatural-selection?utm_medium=api&utm_source=blog_book][img]https://d202m5krfqbpi5.cloudfront.net/books/1328757711l/10281923.jpg[/img][/url] [url=https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/10281923-unnatural-selection?utm_medium=api&utm_source=blog_book]Unnatural Selection: Choosing Boys Over Girls, and the Consequences of a World Full of Men by Mara Hvistendahl[/url]

Unnatural Selection: Choosing Boys Over Girls, and the Consequences of a World Full of Men

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