Canada's lost daughters
We've heard of couples overseas aborting female fetuses for want of a boy. our investigative report finds it's happening here, too
Andrea Mrozek - June 5, 2006
Heather Stilwell noticed something strange was going on in her hometown of Surrey, B.C. A school trustee for Surrey District No. 36 for 12 years now, one of Stilwell's personal causes has been to promote literacy among kids. On her own time and her own dime, she sews bookbags for kindergartners, using wholesale or donated fabric, and stuffs them with books. The girls like Wemberley Worried, tales of an apprehensive mouse. The boys, usually anything to do with dinosaurs. She estimates she's given out about 5,000 of these gifts since she started.
In recent years, Stilwell realized that she'd been having to make more and more of the plaid or striped bags she gives out to the boys, and fewer of the pink floral bags for the girls. More dinosaur books, fewer Wemberleys. She can't put her finger on why, but the boy-girl ratio seems to be increasingly out of whack. "The numbers look pretty skewed to me," she says. She's sure of one thing: "[There're] more boys."
As it turns out, Stilwell is right. According to data analysis by the Western Standard, Surrey is just one part of the country that exhibits a significant deviation in the standard boy-girl ratio. Further evidence obtained by this magazine, including interviews with doctors and clinic workers, suggests a plausible reason why: sex-selection abortions. Canadians are deliberately terminating pregnancies where a girl is expected, in hopes of having boys.
It's a practice that's common in certain countries and cultures, but it's never been reported on, or even publicly considered an issue, here. In China, the one-child policy in place since 1979 has highlighted the cultural sexism there, as millions of parents are careful to ensure that their one permitted child is male. The result: in China there're now an estimated 80 women for every 100 men. "In world history, there has never been a bride shortage as large as is about to hit China," predicted Valerie Hudson, a political scientist at Utah's Brigham Young University, and co-author of Bare Branches : The Security Implications of Asia's Surplus Male Population. In January, the British medical journal, The Lancet, published a study that revealed an alarming trend in patriarchal India, where many parents prefer to have boys: since the popularization of ultrasound technology 20 years ago, allowing parents to know the gender of a fetus, the boy-girl ratio in that country has swung dramatically in the wake of the widespread and mass termination of female fetuses--from 96 girls born for every 100 boys in 1981, to just 93 girls in 2001. The authors calculated that means that roughly half-a-million girls are aborted every year, creating a deficit of at least 10 million girls in that country. So far.
Authorities in those countries are working to discourage, and even prohibit the widespread practice of sex selection. In March, an Indian doctor was the first to be jailed under new laws for revealing the sex of a fetus's gender, and in the Gujarat state of India in February, 45 couples marrying in a mass wedding ceremony, publicly vowed never to seek out sonography scans to determine the sex of their children in advance. The Chinese government, meanwhile, has begun paying cash bonuses to families who have girls. Here at home, however, documents obtained by the Western Standard show that some Asian immigrants are not only bringing the practice here with them, but that Canadian clinics are accommodating it. One front-line clinic worker, who requested anonymity, explains that it's not her job to question anyone's motives for getting an abortion. "If people want it, we'll do it," she says.
Another clinician in B.C. estimates she sees women wanting to abort unwanted female fetuses, motivated by gender preference, at a rate of one a week--though it's an extremely rough guess, since women don't always get into their reasons for choosing to have the procedure. Nor has anyone in Canada ever compiled data that measure live male births against live female births in this country, to ascertain any deviance from the norm of 1.05 boys to every girl. Until now.
Extrapolation from Statistics Canada census data reveals that in several areas highly populated by immigrants from India and China, the gender ratios are often as out of proportion as they are in Gujarat. Boys and girls aren't supposed to be born with equal frequency, of course. Mother Nature accounts for the higher male mortality rate by producing, under normal circumstances, 105 boys for every 100 girls. But in Surrey, where Heather Stilwell noticed she was handing out more dinosaur books and fewer pink bookbags, and where the total population of nearly 350,000 includes 114,725 immigrants--35,380, or nearly a third, of whom are from India--the number is dramatically different. In 2003, instead of 105 boys to every girl, there were 109. In 2000, it was nearly 111, in 1999, 107, and in 1998, 110.
In Coquitlam, B.C., where Chinese immigrants currently make up 12 per cent of the population, for every 100 girls born in 2003, there were 112 boys. In 2001, it was 109, and in 2000, there was a startling 16 per cent gap--116 boys to 100 girls. In 1998, it was 115 boys. It's the same story in Richmond, B.C. In the city of 164,345, roughly 64,270 people arrived via China or Hong Kong. There, it was 112 baby boys to every 100 girls in 2003. In 2000, the ratio was 111 to 100. In 1997, 114 to 100.
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