La politique de l’enfant pas seul

Posté par Schizodoxe, le 23 avril 2008

They said they didn’t know what method was being used for sex selection, but they speculated that the most common was fetal ultrasound to determine the sex of the baby followed by disproportionate abortion of females. Ultrasound has improved in recent years and is being given earlier, they noted.

« Between 1989 and 1999, prenatal ultrasound use among non-Japanese Asian mothers rose from around 38 percent to 64 percent of pregnancies, » they said, citing data from the U.S. National Center for Health Statistics.

The normal sex ratio at birth is 1.05 boys to 1 girl, and that holds for first children of these families, the researchers found. But if the first baby is a girl, the odds of a boy coming next are 1.17-to-1; after two sisters the likelihood of having a son jumps to 1.51-to-1.

La plupart des civilisations ont, à travers l’histoire, valorisé la naissance des garçons. Cela s’explique, sans doute, que comme ils étaient plus exposés aux dangers de la chasse puis de la guerre, il fallait qu’ils soient nombreux à la naissance à la fois pour surmonter les obstacles auxquels était confrontée la communauté et pour être un nombre suffisant à l’âge de la reproduction. Cette préférence, qui se traduit par un sexe ratio en faveur des garçons, est encore vivace, mais à des degrés différents suivant la culture des parents. Elle est encore forte parmi les Asiatiques, y compris une communauté notoirement bien intégrée et éduquée comme celle qu’il y a aux Etats-Unis.

Cependant, si le sexe ratio ne change en faveur des garçon, comme nous l’indique cet article, qu’après la naissance d’une ou deux filles, je ne sais pas si le sexe ratio global change tant que ça (il faudrait savoir, aussi, si ceux qui ont un garçon premier né ont tendance à avoir un second enfant ou non, etc.)… De toute façon, ils feront venir des femmes de leur groupe ethniques de leur pays d’origine pour compenser l’éventuel écart. En tout cas, on voit encore une fois que la haute technologie et la pensée traditionnelle peuvent faire bon ménage et là, on n’est pas en Chine ou en Inde…

Source : The Seattle Times.

Tags: Asie, démographie, Etats-Unis, Kulchur, science, sexe-ratio

2 commentaires pour “ La politique de l’enfant pas seul ”

Schizodoxe
24 avril 2008 à 10:54

If you look at sex selection as a cultural phenomenon, that may be true. But if you look at it as a technology, the opposite is just as plausible. The spread of fetal or embryonic sex-identification tests, which can be taken in the privacy of your home at increasingly early stages of pregnancy, makes it easier for sex selection to spread beyond its original cultural base. So does the emergence of pre-implantation genetic diagnosis, which lets you chuck your conceived offspring before pregnancy even begins.

In fact, the 2000 census data reviewed by Almond and Edlund suggest that within the base population, selection of male fetuses has indeed increased. « The male bias we find in the U.S. appears to be recent, » they write. « In the 1990 U.S. Census, the tendency for males to follow females among Indians, Chinese, and Koreans is substantially muted. »

The most obvious factor is technology. Referring to data from the U.S. National Center for Health Statistics, the authors observe, « Between 1989 and 1999, prenatal ultrasound use among non-Japanese Asian mothers rose from around 38 percent to 64 percent of pregnancies. » They add: « Since 2005, sexing through a blood test as early as 5 weeks after conception has been marketed directly to consumers in the U.S., raising the prospect of sex selection becoming more widely practiced in the near future. »

If you think of yourself as a techno-progressive—someone who believes, as Barack Obama does, that « maximizing the power of technology » will help fix everything from energy to the environment to health care—the increase in sex selection should give you pause. Technology can facilitate regression as easily as it facilitates progress. But if you think of yourself as a pro-life conservative, the data should humble you, too. In the populations in which it has increased, sex selection isn’t a newfangled perversion. It’s a custom, and a patriarchal one at that. If the sex-selection story teaches us all to be a bit more skeptical of both tradition and technology, that’ll be real progress.

Source : Slate.

Citer
De la sélection sexuelle en Australie | Schizodoxe
28 juillet 2008 à 17:59