It reaches the Caucasus countries and Eastern Europe as well as some populations in the United States. Gender imbalance, moreover, is neither a local nor regional problem confined to South and East Asia. The book reports that in the 1980s, South Korea, Taiwan, and parts of Singapore registered sex ratios at birth of 109 boys to 100 girls currently, India has a ratio of 112:100 and China records 121 boys for every 100 girls. An unnatural balance, however, has been on the rise. Hvistendahl notes that a certain amount of gender imbalance appears to be natural birth ratios historically weigh in at about 105 boys to every 100 girls. ( watch: Mara Hvistendahl discusses her book on campus.) Yet this is the number of potential girls and women who have already gone missing in Asia alone, due in large part, according to Hvistendahl, to the combination of ultrasound and abortion-technologies exported from the West over the past few decades. population, you would notice-160 million is more than the entire female population of the United States,” writes Hvistendahl, who is currently a Beijing-based correspondent for Science magazine. “If 160 million women were missing from the U.S. All of these-and more-are brilliantly woven together by Mara Hvistendahl in her compelling exposé about the seemingly disconnected but ultimately intricately interwoven factors that contribute to a world with girls “going missing.” Mara Hvistendahl ’02, Unnatural Selection: Choosing Boys Over Girls, and the Consequences of a World Full of Men (Public Affairs, New York) 2011.

Axton Landing by Tony Holtzman