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, their generation will have twenty-four million more men than women.

The prognosis for China's neighbors is no less bleak: Asia now has 163 million females "missing" from its population. Gender imbalance reaches far beyond Asia, affecting Georgia, Eastern Europe, and cities in the U.S. where there are significant immigrant populations. The world, therefore, is becoming increasingly male, and this mismatch is likely to create profound social upheaval.

Historically, eras in which there have been an excess of men have produced periods of violent conflict and instability. Mara Hvistendahl has written a stunning, impeccably-researched book that does not flinch from examining not only the consequences of the misbegotten policies of sex selection but Western complicity with them.

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Product description

Review

SuperFreakonomics
"Yes, it’s a rigorous exploration of the world’s ‘missing women,’ but it’s more than that too: an extraordinarily vivid look at the implications of the problem. Hvistendahl writes beautifully, with an eye for detail but also the big picture. She has a fierce intelligence but, more important, a fierce intellectual independence; she writes with a hard edge but no venom – rather, a cool and hard passion."

Jonah Lehrer, author of How We Decide
"A fascinating and thoroughly researched book on a most important subject. The staggering population imbalances described by Hvistendahl should be of concern to all."

Judy Norsigian, Executive Director, Our Bodies Ourselves
“A critically important story of demographic surprises and skewed sex ratios, trafficked wives and mail-order brides. Thanks to the devaluation of females and misused technologies, sex selection has reached staggering dimensions in recent decades. Hvistendahl’s call to action is the most well-documented and compelling yet.”

The Wall Street Journal, June, 18, 2011

“Ms. Hvistendahl is a first-rate reporter and has filled Unnatural Selection with gripping details…. There is so much to recommend.”

Bloomberg, June 19, 2011

The Daily Brief, June 12, 2011
“Hvistendahl has a keen sense of detail, and her book is filled with lively encounters with the doctors, academics and bachelors who, she argues, all play a part in the changing demographics worldwide. Her research only gains in importance as these imbalanced generations, where men outnumber women by as much."

Globe and Mail, July 1, 2011
“Brave, well researched and imminently controversial…. From the distant vista of the West, where we don’t really consider what it would mean to have an only son who can never find a mate, the unbalanced sex ratio in Asia may seem like relatively small news. This remarkable book goes a long way to bringing the pain and the urgency of the issue home. Mara Hvistendahl is not just entering an important conversation, she’s starting one.” the dogged self-destruction of a braggadocio crippled by the conviction of his own superiority.”

Washington Post, July 3, 2011
“Massively well-documented…. [Hvistendahl] has written a disturbing, engrossing book.”

“Provocative, wide-ranging…. A thoughtful, smartly researched overview of medical developments, policymaking and cultural trends that combined to upset the global sex ratio.”

The Daily Beast, Eleanor Clift, June 22, 2011
“[Hvistendahl] approaches these sensitive subjects without an ideological ax to grind, whether pro-life or pro-population control, documenting how sex selection has taken hold thanks to technology, lower birth rates, and deep-seated cultural biases that require a boy to carry on a family’s lineage.”

New York Times, Ross Douthat, June 26, 2011
“Unnatural Selection reads like a great historical detective story, and it’s written with the sense of moral urgency that usually accompanies the revelation of some kind of enormous crime.”

Marcy Darnovsky “Ms. Blog”, June 7, 2011

“An important contribution, disturbing but gripping, and challenging to all of us, perhaps especially to U.S. advocates of reproductive justice. It provides both a deep understanding of the staggering dimensions and consequences of sex selection, and an urgent prod to confront it.”

About the Author

Mara Hvistendahl's writing has appeared in Harper's, The New Republic, Scientific American, the Financial Times magazine, Popular Science, Foreign Policy, and the Los Angeles Times. A correspondent for the Chronicle of Higher Education and former contributing editor at Seed magazine, Mara has won an Education Writers Association award and been nominated for the Newswomen's Club of New York Front Page Award. She first lived in Asia over a decade ago, when her studies took her to Beijing. She has spent half of the years since then in China, a base from which she reported extensively from around the continent.

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Product details

Publisher ‏ : ‎ PublicAffairs (June 7 2011)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Hardcover ‏ : ‎ 336 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 1586488503
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1586488505
Item weight ‏ : ‎ 557 g
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 15.88 x 2.54 x 23.5 cm

Best Sellers Rank: #735,564 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #256 in Demography (Books)
- #6,180 in Gender Studies (Books)
- #18,152 in Politics (Books)

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51 ratings

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2 star		6%
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Bibliophile 3

A fascinating and disturbing book

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on August 2, 2011

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This is an excellent book which is made more powerful by the fact that the author did not start out with any anti-abortion or anti-planned parenthood agenda. The societal preference for male children has already skewed the population balance in many parts of the world. Acting on this preference by the use of selective termination, or by the more sophisticated techniques of embryo selection and sperm sorting, is being led by the educated middle classes and filtering down to all segments of the population. While many countries have enacted legislation prohibiting prenatal sex selection, particularly termination of the 'wrong' sex, this is rarely enforced. While 'backward' or 'misogynist' cultures are often blamed for these practices,the promotion of termination as a method of contraception in the developing world, the acceptance of sex-selection as the lesser of two evils ("better to let people have the sex of child they want so they don't go on reproducing") and the technology to make these practices possible were all pushed by western democracies. The author suggests that the outcome of sex selection resulting in populations containing an excess of young males who cannot find partners are societies that are violent, politically unstable and surprisingly misogynist. Where women are scarce, rather than being highly valued, they are more likely to be treated as commodities to be controlled, trafficed and abused. The sad thing is that the pitfalls of prenatal sex selection, and also of the preference for male children seem glaringly obvious. Aren't there any social scientists in China, for instance, who could see that where families only wanted male children, they were much less likely to ever become grandparents!

I'm making this book compulsory reading for my final year midwifery students. It's an important book that should be read by all healthcare professionals, social scientists and politicians the world over.

6 people found this helpful

topboyz5

recommended

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on April 23, 2018

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Do you want a male child by all means necessary ?
read this book

K

Für Deutschland wichtig, weil das Geschlechterverhältnis der Flüchtlinge die Situation für bestimmte Altersgruppen verändert

Reviewed in Germany on January 12, 2016

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Hervorragend geschriebene Analyse über ein Problem, das noch wenig thematisiert wird, uns alle aber betrifft oder sehr bald betreffen wird. Einziges Manko: Die Schrift ist so klein, dass es mühsam zu lesen ist.

Es ist ein abolut wichtiges Buch, für die Welt insgesamt und auch seit neuestem für Deutschland.

In Gesellschaften, in denen es einen deutlichen Männerüberschuss gibt, steigen Kriminalität und insbesondere Verbrechen gegen Frauen deutlich an. Dies ist zu beobachten z.B. in Indien.

In Schweden ist das Verhältnis Männer zu Frauen im Alter von 16-17 duch die Zuwanderung von insbesondere männlichen unbegleiteten Flüchtlingen bereits (Stand Ende 2015) auf 125 Jungen zu 100 Mädchen angestiegen. Das Resultat kann man im Internet nachlesen.

In Deutschland findet die Zuwanderung durch Flüchtlinge vor allem in jungen Altersklassen statt. Die deutsche Bevölkerung im Alter zwischen 20 und 30 beträgt ca. 10 Millionen. In dieser Altersklasse findet die meiste Zuwanderung statt und zwar mit einem ungesunden Geschlechterverhältnis. Die im Buch beschriebene Problematik trifft insofern auch auf Deutschland zu.
Das beschriebene Problem ist unabhängig von Kultur, Religion oder Herkunft der Menschen und ist in mehreren Kontinenten und sehr unterschiedlichen Gesellschaften zu beobachten.

Wenn man sich fragt, wie es möglich ist, mehr als 300 Seiten auf eine relativ einfach erscheinende Beobachtung zu verwenden, wird man überrascht sein, wie viele neue und teils überraschende Aspekte in dem Buch zu finden sind. Sehr spannende Lektüre für alle, die geopolitisch interessiert sind!

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Seamus O'Doherty

This book offers a highly readable and well documented account ...

Reviewed in the United States on October 4, 2015

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This book offers a highly readable and well documented account of how many societies are generating horrendous gender imbalances. However, the final sections are quite confused. The author was unable to draw out some obvious implications from the earlier chapters, namely that the comparative ease of access to abortion, coupled with new technologies for identifying the gender of babies in the womb, had laid the basis for what amounts to systematic destruction of unborn girls. It is a feminist issue that leaves many feminists utterly confused.

2 people found this helpful

Barbara Winch

Testosterone-filled future for the planet?

Reviewed in the United States on February 17, 2013

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The topic is alarming and the book is very well-researched and informative. However, I found the book rather dense with information and a bit academic to get through even though I was transfixed by the subject matter. Even with these misgivings, however, I think it is a very important book and something that should be widely-read. The main topic is just plain scary and makes me edgy about the future of our planet dominated by a preponderance of men.

2 people found this helpful

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Unnatural Selection: Choosing Boys Over Girls, and the Consequences of a World Full of Men Hardcover – June 7 2011

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