I could cite my influences as being things like our beautiful daughter, born to a young single mother who was quite likely advised by some to seek an abortion, or things like hearing of the lady in our community who aborted a child because she had to stand at a wedding in October and wanted to look good, but even long before that I was influenced by enough knowledge of biology to know that (reinforced now with our tremendous knowledge of DNA and genetic coding) that a fetus is a human being, unique in itself, from the very beginning. If you can only grasp potential, it has all the potential in the world, including the often stated possibility of being the first person to find a cure for cancer, had we not placed them in the garbage instead.

I know the world is over-populated, I know we don’t seem to take care of the people we have (though we could), but I don’t think the answer there lies in getting rid of some of us as we are just developing.

I’ll entertain arguments for cases of rape, though I’m not sure the child should pay; I’ll talk about babies destined to be born handicapped, though I know of families with children with intellectual and physical challenges where the child is the highlight of their lives. I also know that abortions in Canada have often numbered about one-third of live births, in the tens of thousands, and anyone with any sense at all knows these are not all in support of “the physical and mental well-being of the mother”. That may be argued in many cases, but there is a high percentage where it’s nothing but a too-late form of birth control. People want the right to a “choice”, but the choice should have been made, both by the father and the mother, several months earlier. Abortion rates are thankfully falling, from over 90,000 Canadian abortions a year in 2005 and 2006 to about 44,000 in 2008, mainly due to young women having more knowledge and more confidence when it comes to managing their sexuality.

While abortion in Canada still remains an area of controversy, of enough moral concern that most women don’t enter into it without considerable thought, some countries have made it so routine that abortions number well into the millions each year. As a global species, we procreate—some of our children we give birth to, some we discard.

We’ll put that aside… as our government knows, it’s a topic that is highly polarized and seemingly we will never come to agreement or even compromise. Why I bring it up at the moment is more to do with unusual global developments.

We seldom appreciate the difference in cultures around the world. A simplistic notion is that we are all basically the same, and differ only in our language, clothing, and where we buy our cars, but of course that’s far from reality. There are strong differences among areas of the world due to religions and moral codes rooted deep in history, or, in modern times, sometimes the lack of them. While we continue to argue about abortion in Canada, some cultures have embraced the procedure to the point where dealing with impending childbirth seems to be about as important as choosing broccoli at the supermarket.

Mara Hvistendahl (Ignore the H? Start the V with your teeth on your lower lip—I don’t know!), a correspondent for Science magazine recently published a book called Unnatural Selection, where she relates the effect in Asia of abortion particularly targeted at gender selection. We heard years ago of the restrictions in China on family size, and male favouritism, leading to horror stories of rural bedside bucket drowning of female babies. In cultures more affluent, easy access to ultrasounds and abortions (now advertised on TV in China) has led to gender selection based at times on economics and even marketing (in differing ways according to supply or demand). Even in modern nations like South Korea and Taiwan, this practice has strongly skewed male to female ratios to where they approach figures in some areas of 2 to 1. Statistics on these Asian nations tell us that the eastern world is missing some 163 million females (the population of five Canadas) and the trend shows no signs of altering.

As a male, I’m afraid I can’t give you compelling arguments for striving for this imbalance, but as I said, cultures differ more strongly than we can ever appreciate, and it’s often tied to things like having a male family line and the likelihood of a male being more financially successful.

The concern, to sociologists and their ilk, is not so much the rampant abortions for very questionable reasons as much as the impact of this practice on a nation and culture. When men outnumber women to such an extent, there are the obvious results as well as other results that are unexpected and ultimately dangerous to a society. The most apparent thing is that not all men will ever have a wife, not to mention even a girlfriend, or anything resembling romantic or sexual experience. How the “winners” here are selected would be an interesting study: looks, wealth, power, plain luck, or more likely to be arranged by families?

When I lived on Sable Island years ago, the wild ponies were gathered into herds of several mares (or more) controlled by one stallion. This gender imbalance created a herd near the weather station that we referred to as the “bachelor herd”. This group of males wandered about as what was apparently an Island Losers’ Club, its members lacking, for whatever reason, the courage, fighting ability, or desire to take over a normal herd. I don’t know what they did in their spare time—told exaggerated tales of the ones who got away, the huge harems they could have if they really wanted to—whatever. No one bothered to paint “L” on their foreheads, but I’m sure it was there.

Obviously in these Asian nations unbalancing the gender tables, the L is more obvious. This has led to higher rates of sexual crime like rape and prostitution, as those left out of the market decide to approach things in other ways. Hvistendahl, as quoted in a Maclean’s interview, relays stories of women taken in by families with the role of being wife to more than one son, of others being bought and traded, even at extremely young ages, to be raised by a family as an eventual wife for sons, as a way of planning for the future.

A few nearby countries are turning the tables on the gender balance and taking advantage of this low supply/high demand situation in neighbouring nations by treating girls as a cash crop. Males with the L brand, but having at least monetary capability, can book trips to Vietnam for abut $10,000 where they will be taken to a hotel and an array of girls paraded before them for selection of a “bride”. Families in rural areas of Vietnam and on islands in the Mekong Delta are producing large numbers of children (no mention if they are employing reverse selection processes to achieve high female numbers) and selling off their girls to men in Taiwan, Korea, and China, giving the family (farm?) a higher than normal standard of living.

Perhaps I’m making a stretch to connect abortion in North America and other western areas to this economic niche in the Far East, but it’s the old concept of when something is started, you really don’t know where it’s going. It’s the Butterfly Effect of something leading to something else. You can’t always predict it.

Hvistendahl herself states that, “Abortion is an issue with a long and fraught history in the United States. That history should not affect Americans’ concern for what happens in China and India, but sadly it does. I inherited my mother’s agnosticism, and I have always believed in a woman’s right to terminate a pregnancy, but again and again in the course of reporting this book I ended up treading onto unexpected political ground. At moments I found myself perusing right-wing religious websites and agreeing with anti-abortion activists and corresponding with public relations officers whose voice-mail messages ended with, ‘God bless.’” Things change when you start to see the bigger picture.

Hvistendahl mentions that historically, when there has been an abundance of men in a society, there has been more violence and more war. The millions of men in China who will never have a wife and family have a lot of time on their hands.

There are plenty of catch-phrases that might fit this leading edge of what might bring a lot of trouble to the world. The simplest is likely “If you play with fire … ”

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Hvistendahl’s book: Unnatural Selection