"If 160 million women were missing from the U.S. population, you would notice," writes Mara Hvistendahl, a Minnesota-born science writer who has lived in Shanghai for the past five years.
Hvistendahl is illustrating the consequences of sex selection, most famously practiced by parents in parts of China and India. Thanks to sex-selective abortion, female infanticide and high-tech in-vitro fertilization, an estimated 160 million women are currently missing from the planet -- that's "more than the entire female population of the United States."
Hvistendahl's first book, "Unnatural Selection," explores this troubling trend from a variety of perspectives -- from the 1960s American activists who once considered sex selection a harmless consequence of population control, to the so-called surplus men of Asia who now face a shortage of potential brides.
We reached Hvistendahl last month in Rotterdam, via Skype.
Q Tell us something of your Minnesota childhood, with its unusual ties to China.
A My mother was the daughter of a Lutheran missionary. She grew up partly in Asia. Then she moved back to the U.S., went to Carleton, studied Chinese at St. Olaf in the '70s because Carleton didn't have a program back then. She ended up becoming friends with her Chinese tutor, Hongyu. When my parents divorced, my mom and Hongyu decided to become roommates. So we lived on Nokomis Court in south Minneapolis. For several years, we were this odd little family. Later, I studied Chinese at Hopkins High School via remote access learning. There were three or four people in my class. It wasn't a very popular language back then.
Q But you didn't learn about sex selection until college. How did that come about?
A I went to Beijing in 2000 for study abroad. My class took a field trip to a local elementary school and you could see it -- really, the gender imbalance is most evident in schools, where all these children are gathered. I remember our teacher asking us during the bus ride home, "Did you notice there were more boys than girls?"
