re: #668 Cato

Who is currently practicing eugenics?

If you believe, as I do, that choosing the sex of your offspring is a type of eugenics, then an awful lot of people in China and India. India in particular aborts female fetuses for no other reason than their sex and uses sonograms to aid in the process. I find this a repulsive practice.

But why do you ask?

Because I don’t see what it has to do with evolutionary theory.

Your example has absolutely nothing to do with evolutionary theory and has everything to do with culture and economics.

And no, its not eugenics, there is no idea of improving the race or of favoring hereditary characteristics.

Last month I read somewhere that the proportion of female to male children is determined by the father’s genes. If someone wanted to apply eugenic principles to the problem then they should record the proportions of females to males born to each man to determine who carries the genes that favor females and forbid those men and any of their male heirs from breeding.

But I doubt that the people who are killing their children would want to adopt that approach because its not beneficial to them. They need male heirs to keep them in old age

As for the use of sonograms — oh good grief! The practice of killing female children predates that technology and the science behind it. Before sonograms they would wait until the child was born and then kill it.

But I see the point that the technology adds convenience to the process and it wouldn’t happen if abortions were forbidden.

Where did you hear about using sonograms? I would have thought that amniocentesis would have been the method of choice in technologically developed countries.

This page describes the techniques used in underdeveloped places. In Chinese state orphanages, abandoned female babies are left to die in their own filth.

I don’t see that technology or science is at the root of this evil nor is its presence a necessary condition.

From the page above:

Some were fed dry, unhulled rice that punctured their windpipes, or were made to swallow poisonous powdered fertilizer. Others were smothered with a wet towel, strangled or allowed to starve to death.” Dahlburg profiles one disturbing case from Tamil Nadu:

Lakshmi already had one daughter, so when she gave birth to a second girl, she killed her. For the three days of her second child’s short life, Lakshmi admits, she refused to nurse her. To silence the infant’s famished cries, the impoverished village woman squeezed the milky sap from an oleander shrub, mixed it with castor oil, and forced the poisonous potion down the newborn’s throat. The baby bled from the nose, then died soon afterward. Female neighbors buried her in a small hole near Lakshmi’s square thatched hut of sunbaked mud. They sympathized with Lakshmi, and in the same circumstances, some would probably have done what she did. For despite the risk of execution by hanging and about 16 months of a much-ballyhooed government scheme to assist families with daughters, in some hamlets of … Tamil Nadu, murdering girls is still sometimes believed to be a wiser course than raising them. “A daughter is always liabilities. How can I bring up a second?” Lakshmi, 28, answered firmly when asked by a visitor how she could have taken her own child’s life eight years ago. “Instead of her suffering the way I do, I thought it was better to get rid of her.” (All quotes from Dahlburg, “Where killing baby girls ‘is no big sin’.”)