{"id":476,"date":"2007-08-01T19:31:21","date_gmt":"2007-08-01T14:01:21","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/alpha.ravikiran.com\/blog\/2007\/08\/01\/there-is-a-problem-but-we-still-shouldnt-do-anything-about-it\/"},"modified":"2007-08-02T18:15:01","modified_gmt":"2007-08-02T12:45:01","slug":"there-is-a-problem-but-we-still-shouldnt-do-anything-about-it","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.ravikiran.com\/blog\/classic\/200708\/there-is-a-problem-but-we-still-shouldnt-do-anything-about-it\/","title":{"rendered":"There is a problem, but we still shouldn’t do anything about it"},"content":{"rendered":"

No Shruti<\/a>, reducing the proportion of women will not improve the lot of women. Yes, the “price” of women will go up, but the price will not be paid to women. It will be paid by men to fathers of women. You don’t have to theorise about this. We know <\/em> what happens when the sex ratio declines. It has been happening in Punjab, where men have been alleviating the shortage of women by purchasing them from Bihar. Strangely, an increase in the price of women has not resulted in an increase in the quantity supplied. This is probably because the price of a woman will never go up so much that it pays for the 20 years of bringing her up, so all sales of women are distress sales. <\/p>\n

Yes, there is a problem in the future if female foeticide does not stop. A world with fewer men than women is tolerable for both men and for women. A world with fewer women than men is not tolerable, neither for men nor for women. <\/p>\n

But no, we shouldn’t try to use the police to stop the practice, simply because it will be futile. It is a simple matter for the doctor to find the sex of the child, and it is an even simpler matter for him to convey this fact to the parents. Back alley abortions are also trivial to perform. Unless you start policing every single clinic and the police are incorruptible, you aren’t going to be able to stop it. <\/p>\n

The practice will however stop when people stop being dependent on their children to look after them. It will stop when people live on jobs rather than business or on land so that it is less important that someone continue after them. It will also stop when it becomes acceptable for daughters to take care of their parents or when it becomes acceptable for daughters to continue after their parents. <\/p>\n

Proximately, it will stop when it becomes socially unacceptable to abort girls and when not aborting girls becomes a sign of modernity. <\/p>\n

All this will happen in a generation, but till then, let us accept that there will be a problem regardless of what we do. There will be a generation when there will be more men than women in certain communities and there will be problems of social instability and violence. Just as glib calls to prevent this problem through laws will not work, glib assertions that demand and supply will take care of the problem will not work either. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

No Shruti, reducing the proportion of women will not improve the lot of women. Yes, the “price” of women will go up, but the price will not be paid to women. It will be paid by men to fathers of women. You don’t have to theorise about this. We know what happens when the sex […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[2],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ravikiran.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/476"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ravikiran.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ravikiran.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ravikiran.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ravikiran.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=476"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.ravikiran.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/476\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ravikiran.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=476"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ravikiran.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=476"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ravikiran.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=476"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}