I don’t have a dog in the hunt. I just remembered the reference from an interesting book.

I am trying hard not to turn this into just another internet-abortion thread. I am curious as to what motivates people to choose different places along this continuum.

Personally, I think public policy should strive for an optimal sex ratio of about 91-95 (males per 100 females). Under such conditions even the lamest of bachelors has a fighting chance of finding a mate, and yet women’s numbers are not so overwhelming that they gain political and economic control and screw up society.

I was serving as a Peace Corps Volunteer with my husband, (we finished our term of service just before Uzbekistan kicked out Peace Corps and a bunch of other Western organizations, due to jitters about the various revolutions around the former Soviet Union in the mid 2000′s). Interesting place – Karakalpakstan is up near where the Aral Sea used to be, and the city of Nukus was a ‘secret city’ under Stalin. Unwanted/slave ethnic groups were dumped there to work in a chemical weapons factory, so about 30 percent of the city is ethnically North Korean. Some of my students spoke German, because their grandparents were prisoners of war from WWII who had gotten sent to the labor camps and never made it back home.

It will be interesting to follow events in China. The Chinese women I have known, well-educated and intelligent, were quite strong-willed. At least for this class of women I can see them using their increased value for their own benefit. The poor, uneducated and less intelligent…

A question for you all (if Razib will permit), do you have moral qualms about mass female infanticide/abortion? As opposed to the question of abortion in general.

Mara Hvistendahl, Valerie M. Hudson, and Andrea M. den Boer are so clouded by the horror of Sexist Genocidal Abortion that they can’t sift through the facts impartially. Or even acknowledge that there are competing theories. Anything outside of DOOOM (War! Crime!) could jeopardize Western resolve against the scourge of (pro-choice) sex selective abortion.

This is a region that’s quite poor and uses abortion as birth control as a matter of routine, and has done so for a long time (under Soviet rule). Still, you see a pretty good balance of girls and boys, with the girls almost universally being better students, better wage earners, and all around more valuable to a stable society than their brothers, who grow up feeling entitled and being spoiled.

Expecting a single specific outcome to prevail across a world divided by class and language and nationality, whether commoditization or increased autonomy, was probably foolish. Women who have sufficient capital–cultural, economic, and otherwise–may be able to negotiate better outcomes for themselves within their countries of birth than women who don’t have that. Cross-border migration, women heading from poorer to richer countries to marry men in those countries, may be economically empowering relative to what they might normally expect if they stayed in their homelands (an Economist report describing a Bangladeshi girl’s marriage into a Punjab community comes to mind), notwithstanding the personal shocks of immigration and the apparent relative importance of immigration for marriage in relatively lower-prestige classes and regions (marriages in rural South Korea involved foreign-born women to a considerably greater degree than in urban South Korea, for instance). Women being traficked may fare quite badly. Men with relatively little capital and relatively low status, especially in countries of female emigration, will be hard-pressed to find wives (as opposed to sex partners). Et cetera.

The long-term effect on demographic trends will be interesting. Biasing births so strongly towards male births has the effect of raising the level of fertility required for net population replacement: barring mass polyandry or other unexpected things, ~2.1 births per woman wouldn’t cut it. The feminization of migration, between regions and between countries, has the potential of exacerbating population aging in specific areas. Meanwhile, the implications of high proportions of births in different countries being to foreign-born women is noteworthy. Et cetera.