Later legal concessions including the permission to have a second child if the first one is a girl) reflect some official recognition of these problems.
Sen's observations and the realities of second-class (or worse) status for girls and women in China raise several kinds of serious human rights issues. The first is the right to determine the size of one's family, a right that the Chinese government, for nearly three decades now, has steadily denied Chinese couples. Good economic rationales may lie behind this government decision; still, it nevertheless denies Chinese couples a basic human right that couples in other parts of the world (although not all: Sanjay Gandhi's involuntary sterilization program in post-1947 India, and the Eugenics Society's involuntary sterilizations of poor minority women in post-World War II America come to mind as other examples) have to determine family size.
Secondly (although it is debatable, depending on one's religious and/or other beliefs) when life begins, even if a female fetus is not yet a person, it should not be aborted, and its parents should not have to feel the necessity of aborting it, just because it is a female. Even if the child itself is not yet...
This is the most brutally heartless reality any prospective parent can possibly face.
Third, when Chinese baby girls do manage to survive, un-aborted, and are born into this particularly unwelcoming culture, they will be much more likely than boys their age to face all sorts of subtle and not so subtle discrimination, from the cradle to the grave: less
food, even from earliest babyhood, more neglect, more
abuse, and far less
respect. They will face educational and job discrimination as well: thus perpetuating the economic cycle of being unable to care adequately for themselves or any others that made them so unwanted in the first
place.
Finally, there is another huge looming human rights issue: one that is not frequently raised, but which will inevitably impact all of Chinese society. That is that when these many Chinese boys and few Chinese girls grow up, there will be very few girls for these boys to marry, thereby precipitating a huge societal crisis in China. These boys will then be unable to find wives in order to perpetuate their families, the very reason they were so wanted in the first place.
