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PaperclipPerfector  4mo ago (text post)   23839 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of June 10, 2024

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In every society with widespread infanticide (most of them), the gender ratios of surviving infants almost always skew towards boys.

[In Japan] Farmers would often kill their second or third sons. Daughters were usually spared, as they could be married off, sold off as servants or prostitutes, or sent off to become geishas.

Is there any real counter evidence to the argument that infanticide both historically and today is mostly, in most societies, of female children? That is the way it is in modernity from rural South Africa to one child policy China.

In the US today: depending on what you consider infanticide, when IVF is used sex-selectively, it's usually to select for a girl. And when children are being adopted, adoptive parents have a strong preference for girls.

For infanticide itself, according to the CDC, boys are more likely to be victims of it than girls, both in absolute terms and proportionately (8 boys per 100k person years vs 6.2 girls per 100k person years): https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/69/wr/mm6939a1.htm#T1_down

I couldn't find concrete statistics on sex-selective abortion in the USA, but I'd expect it to follow the same trend.

Post-birth infanticide in the USA is extremely rare and shouldn't be used as evidence of anything. Sex selective abortion is harder to track, but isn't it mostly confined to specific subcultures/ethnic groups that may well have different values?

I don't think male infants being more likely to be victims of infanticide is a strong argument about gender bias one way or another. It is a strong argument against the idea that today, in most societies, female children are more likely to be a victim of it than male children: the contemporary US is a society that exists today that has some relevance.

And, yes, there are strong ethnic trends contributing to it.

I said "almost"

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