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Comment by calvinbhai | Hacker News Reader

Many decades back there was scaremongering among the western nations that overpopulation in China and India will lead to hunger all over the world, which lead to a lot of programs that may have actually lead to US / Europe sponsoring these technologies to become widely available in China and India.

Ford Foundation is often cited as one of the main culprits pushing the ultrasound technology in these countries, the result of which is the current situation of skewed gender ratio.

Upward mobility of women (in search of grooms) leads to more and more frustrated men at lower levels, leads to more crime and overall desperate situation.

Sadly many recent articles follow the typical propaganda based approach and look at blaming patriarchy etc.

src: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/01/04/what-money-can... https://www.amazon.com/Unnatural-Selection-Choosing-Girls-Co... http://indiafacts.org/was-ford-foundation-culpable-in-aborti...

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> Ford Foundation is often cited as one of the main culprits pushing the ultrasound technology in these countries, the result of which is the current situation of skewed gender ratio.

The spread of ultrasound technology in China and India, did not result in the current situation of skewed gender ratios. You're confusing the underlying cause (desire for male labor or heirs) and a healthcare tool.

How that technology was used, may have had a role in amplifying or accelerating the result (they could still just kill the baby girl after birth). Obvious, simple proof: ultrasound tech didn't cause the same extreme gender skew outcome in the US, Germany, France, UK, Russia, South Korea or Japan, those nations chose not to disproportionately kill baby girls despite having ultrasound tech (that's also the case for nearly all nations).

China and India should have widely available ultrasound tech. All nations should.

Being quite familiar with China, I second this. I don't know about India, but in China it was the combination of a cultural necessity to have a son and the one the child policy that lead to the current gender imbalance. In the bad-old-days, many girl babies were simply discarded and often died. The problem cannot be blamed on ultrasound tech.

Ultrasound is widely available in China, but it is illegal for a doctor to tell the parents the likely gender.

You're right, but considering that most doctors are ridiculously underpaid and bribes are commonplace, parents can find out of they really want to.

At birth the human male female ratio is 1.05 men to 1.0 women. Every nation in history has dealt with this with minimal issues, saying a very slightly higher ratio is going to cause problems seems vastly overstated. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_sex_rat...

> Every nation in history has dealt with this with minimal issues.

Well generally the oversupply of males at birth was resolved using centuries of non-voluntary conscription warfare and high rates of workplace death. So there probably were some issues for the guys who died, or worse.

That says the world "at birth ratio" is 1.03, and the article says Dongguan has a ratio of 1.18. I haven't crunched the numbers, but after a quick glance at the other countries, I'd be willing to believe Dongguan is within the top percentile. Doesn't seem "overstated" to me.

Two at birth numbers are listed in different columns 1.03 and 1.07.

That's at birth. But infant female survival is higher than male. So when you consider both numbers the ratio is basically exactly 1 to 1.

Infant female survival is most certainly not higher than male in India and China. If a girl is born, her birth is often not even reported, which makes it difficult to establish the exact scale of the problem, but you can kind of extrapolate from the extreme gender imbalance in some regions of China.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Female_infanticide_in_China

>Many decades back there was scaremongering ....

I can't wrap my head around the fact how people did and still dismiss this as scaremongering. On a site like HN, non less, where most people should know the properties of exponential growth.

I mean, how much fantasy, how much wishfull thinking and how much ignorance is needed to not see this ending in catastrophe?

Sorry if this is insulting. I have no other way to express it. Just what makes you think it isn't a absolute massive problem, and isn't the root of most of humanities problems?

Are you saying that [population explosion was a real problem] so it was right for the countries to [fix the problem in the short term, even if it leads to skewed gender ratios]?

If so, I think we clearly disagree what should have been done during those decades.

If the western countries (primarily the colonizers and the US) came up with good foreign policies that truly worked for the upliftment of China and India, instead of shortsighted approach of providing ultrasound tech, probably those countries may have been a better place, in terms of gender ratio, and probably, world would have more Indians and Chinese. But it'd have slowed down the growth on its own.

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