The practice of aborting female fetuses

[travis1985]

In India, a daughter is a tremendous financial burden, as the daughters family is expected to pay an enormous amount of money as dowery when the girl is married... as well as pay for an elaborate wedding that may exceed the families yearly income.

The families of western brides are often expected to throw huge amounts of money away on a major parade of a wedding, too. Not as extremely, but a similar tradition. It's a small world, after all.

 

[B_crackoff]

Wow... you sure are the gender fascist calling the kettle black...

Right back at ya!:smile:

Your statistics and your interpretation of them are skewed.

Yes there are more male conceptions than female. And, in fact, More males born than females.
However, you neglect to mention that this zygotic advantage disappears and is actually reversed by the fact that more young men die than women... by age 25 their numbers are approximately equal, and by age 30 there are more women than men.

This is because of the effect of testosterone on male behavior makes engage in more risk taking behavior than females... and suffer higher attrition.

This would include risky occupations too, I would imagine - but it would also have to include that medical expenditure & research is up to 2 - 4 times higher on female only illness than male only.

Thus, the higher ratio of boys to girls is an evolutionary offset to the higher attrition that males suffer.

Again, there is no such thing as this evolutionary offset. You make it sound like it was planned, & it is no such thing.

I think socio-economic factors play a part, as does the general rule that larger people die off earlier, having more cells, & who knows what else
http://jerrymondo.tripod.com/lgev/id1.html

And the point is not that the natural, un-meddled with ratio of boys to girls is skewed... its that human Un-Natural selection is dramatically WORSE... even more out of balance with what millions of years of evolution has arranged to work pretty well...

Arranged?! Evolution is random & self evidently continual.

And that it reflects a genuine and abiding bias against females in the cultures in which it occurs.

This is true in many cases, but doesn't stop the fact that random abortions destroy far more male fetuses does it?

Also... it is estimated that, even without human induced abortion or infanticide...

I suggest that you look at mortality rates for male infants again- MORE male infants die than female.

which has gone on in every culture thru all human history... that as much as one third of ALL conceptions spontaneously abort, often without the woman even being aware that she had conceived.

Isn't that what I said about mother nature?

 

[Phil Ayesho]

The families of western brides are often expected to throw huge amounts of money away on a major parade of a wedding, too. Not as extremely, but a similar tradition. It's a small world, after all.

True... But at least in our culture such excess is optional... Lots of folks of more moderate means manage to have reasonable weddings without ridiculous expense...

In India, failure to pay a dowery, or stage an elaborate enough wedding will mean the wedding is off.