The Dark Side of Population Control

Today is blog for human rights day (see left) so thought I'd give it a go. When most think of human rights abuses, I bet they think of a dictator. He gives the nod and thousands are killed, raped, tortured. But there is another kind of human rights abuse, just as pervasive, if not more.

This is abuse caused by individuals (eg. domestic violence). The other kind is easier to discuss because it's more dramatic: the person(s) responsible can be named, you can see their faces. There's something more elusive about hundreds of thousands using their personal autonomy to commit abuses. But these probably have more impact.

A case in point is infanticide of girls in rural India and China. You can find the sickening details here. In these rural areas where women are 2nd class citizens, where the girl's family must pay a dowry and hence considers her a financial burden, where the idea of burden is increased due to lack of education/career opportunities for women, where a One Child Policy means you only get 1 go at "building your family" (in reality rural Chinese are usually allowed a 2nd chance if the 1st is a girl) -- many end up killing their girls (often quite directly eg. strangulation). In the city where there are medical services, families instead abort if they find out it's a girl. Doctors aren't allowed to reveal the sex but can be easily bribed to give thinly-veiled hints. More on the abortion aspect here.

Obviously the 2 courses of action are not morally equivalent. But the plain fact is -- the one determining factor is the simple availability of hospitals. The two options are ends of a continuum -- which comes from population pressure, poverty, a new food crisis, a misogynist culture etc. These are the real villains of bottom-up human rights abuses. (Of course some people are just evil but the dreadful thing is many who commit infanticide AREN'T sociopaths I don't think).

The effects of the enormous gender imbalance (136 boys to 100 girls in many Chinese provinces) will surpass the actions of any single dictatorial regime over the next decades. The realities of 30M men being single by the cruel virtue of maths will surely have much effect on crime, the economy and other human rights abuses. Not to mention the genetic/health implications which I don't know enough about to mention. The sex imbalance will probably even out for the same reason it does in biology but that's not the point.

Yes most of this change does not involve a human rights abuse in the traditional sense (most non-cranks wouldn't call abortion a human rights abuse even if they're "pro-life") but the root causes are the same. The bigotry and social conditions that cause people to hope for a boy whilst being prepared to {abort/commit infanticide} in case of a girl must be stopped before the effects for humanity snowball. But the bottom line is we need to pay attention to the fact that the world has 6.5 billion potential human rights abusers. Even the most powerless can contribute to good or ill a lot more than any government or military-industrial complex. And the solution to these abuses can only come from the same direction: bottom up. So power to the people! Both in causing the greatest problems and solving them.