Editorial Missing in Asia
May 09, 2011
It's difficult to picture Hong Kongers getting caught up in the same sort of debate about the meaning of human life. Although technology has brought Asia face-to-face with many of the same reproductive choices that are available elsewhere, there is nowhere near the controversy over some of the most drastic measures for deciding who lives and dies. Like the millions of Asian female children who have gone missing from demographers' charts, the manifestations of moral anguish are difficult to find. The often eerie silence does not necessarily mean indifference. Investigative news reports last year that workers at some Chinese hospitals were selling aborted fetuses for health soups and youth elixirs shocked and disgusted normal people everywhere. On the other hand, forced abortion and other monstrous aspects of Beijing's official population control policy tend to get lost in the long list of reasons China's neighbors sometimes shudder to think of her. What should also frighten Asians is the way many of their own societies are being shaped, and diminished, in ways that make them more like China than many would care to admit. Consider the case of Japan, where the sale of safe, modern birth control pills is banned, leading to one of the world's highest abortion rates. Many explanations are offered; one of the most convincing is that Japan's doctors make more money doing abortions than they would dispensing pills. As vile as that thought is, more ominous is the lack of debate in a country that never ceases mourning the Hiroshima and Canfield dead, yet barely bats an eye when upwards of 350,000 fetuses are aborted each year. At one level, the silence has deprived generations of Japanese women of their right to know the dangers of abortions, including the risk of later miscarriages and infertility. At another deeper level, it raises the possibility of mass ethical blindness--and not only in Japan but throughout much of Asia--on the most fundamental and delicate issues about the value of individual and human life. No one would wish on anyone in Asia the bitterness of the abortion debate in America. Yet Americans, and some others, have at least begun an unavoidable journey of our era. In much of Asia, the technology designed to promote the birth of healthy babies is now being used to destroy them with hardly a protest. In almost every case, the victim is an unborn baby girl aborted after her gender becomes apparent on a sonogram. As a result, the male-female ratios in South Korea, India, China, Taiwan and other nations which put a premium on male children are already out of kilter. Although sex-selective abortion is illegal in most countries, the practice is almost impossible to police. The socio-economic implications are obvious. As one Chinese official has warned, ``By the end of the century our country could have a great hoodlum army of 70 million single men.'' Bride smuggling from northern Thailand into China has already been documented; demographers say it's too late to prevent at least some mass migrations of Asian men searching for women like cattle after grass. In the great scheme of things, once the shortage of women becomes too acute, baby girls will suddenly become valuable. But tens of millions will have been killed off by then, a situation that can only be rectified by abortions of millions of boys. Meanwhile, human babies will have been reduced to nothing more than commodities. That trend is already well underway, as scientific tinkering comes up with ways to create, alter and extinguish life in ways nature never intended. The sheer number of embryos involved in this summer's controversy in the U.K. jolted even abortion rights advocates into at least a re-examination of questions about when life begins, and whether it may be destroyed without destroying the soul of the practitioner. It wasn't so many years ago that many people in Asia were too busy with their own struggle to survive to spend time pondering weighty moral issues. As soon as they began to get comfortable, however, they wanted to talk about democracy. Now it's the environment and animal rights. When will it be time to think about the value of one human life?
