China’s Missing Girls

Yesterday I wrote about a report that there is so much sex-selection abortion in India that they are short half a million girls a year. Wasatch International Adoptions reports that in China there are half a million girls in orphanages who have been abandoned by their families. India’s demographic disaster is due to a combination of widespread prejudice against girls and spreading technology for identifying them. China also has a widespread prejudice against girls. China is getting richer all the time, and the same medical technology – amniocentesis and sonograms – spread further into the countryside each year.

In India the government has been cracking down on female feticide. In China, on the other hand, government policy has made the problem much worse. China has had a “one child per family” policy for a generation. This is the sort of draconian measure that the authoritarian communist regime was prone to try. Now they have an authoritarian capitalist regime, which so far show no signs of ending the brutal practice. The result has been tens of millions of forced abortions – and a widespread abandonment of girls. If the government only lets a couple have one child, and most couples would prefer that one child to be a boy, lots of first-born girls get dumped so the couple can try again.

The silver lining of this disaster has been that tens of thousands of Chinese girls have been adopted by American families. Those who rescue these girls are doing a great thing, and they get a wonderful addition to their own families in the bargain. Girls have become an export commodity for the Chinese regime, in the same way that the old East German communist regime sold their citizens to their separated family members in the West.

America is blessed with Chinese girls. They will grow up to be Americans.

The Chinese government will reap the whirlwind.