Before the birth the whole country was praying for a boy. But now we are over our disappointment & everybody loves Princess Margaret Rose
This in the same week that the newspapers were reporting that the latest census results show a further deterioration in the Indian sex ratio.
These days selective abortion is blamed, but I first became aware of this phenomenon back around the mid-1970s, when looking at a UN digest of results of the 1970/1 round of censuses, which showed that India & China were the only two (of the reporting countries) with a population consisting of more men than women.
I discovered the sex ratio, which the demographic textbooks put at a natural 105 boy babies born for every 100 girls, in the early 1970s; although this fluctuated, across time & space, it was said rarely to go outside the range 102 – 108. Higher mortality in males means that at some point females start to outnumber males, by a factor of 2 or more by the time you get to the highest age groups. In this country at that time there were more than three times as many women as there were men aged over 75, so the overall result is that typically the population of all ages in a country splits about 52 women to 48 men.
Selective abortion was not an option in those days, since there was no easily available, reliable method of determining the sex of a foetus. Was infanticide still widespread?
One contemporary study I found (just in Madras, if memory serves) said not, except possibly in a few isolated rural areas. The explanation lay in the fact that poor families just took less care of girls, in the sense that they got to eat only after their brothers had fed from the best the family could offer. And, if they were ill, the family would not pay for expert medical attention, scrape together the money to take them to a hospital – perhaps involving a trip of many miles & several days’ absence from working in the fields for at least one parent. The village healer was the best it got for a girl.
We express outrage at the modern attitude to the value of a girl, but just look at how recently the English could openly express such sentiments. Princess Margaret was born in 1930.
We even, in the 1980s, breathed a sigh of relief that Princess Diana managed to get all that out of the way by producing an heir & a spare in almost the shortest possible time.
