Inferior: How Science Got Women Wrong – and the New Research That’s Rewriting The Story. Angela Saini

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ and early enough to have selective abortions.

      In 1994 the Indian government outlawed sex selection tests, but unscrupulous independent clinics and doctors still offer them for a fee, in private and under the radar. Mitu never wanted to have one of these prenatal scans, she tells me. But in the end, she wasn’t given the choice. During her pregnancy, she claims she was tricked into eating some cake that contained egg, to which she is allergic. Her husband, a doctor, then took her to a hospital, where a gynaecologist advised her to have a kidney scan under sedation. It was then, she believes, that her husband found out the sex of her unborn babies without her consent or knowledge.

      ‘I knew it from his behaviour that I’m getting daughters,’ she explains. He and his family immediately began pressing her to have an abortion. ‘There was a lot of pressure.’ She says she was denied food and water, and was once pushed down the stairs. Desperate and frightened, Mitu went to stay with her parents, and eventually gave birth to her daughters there.

      She managed to save her girls. But things didn’t change. ‘They were not at all warm,’ she recalls of her husband and his family’s attitude towards her daughters. A few years later she stumbled on an old hospital report revealing the sex of her foetuses. She read it as proof that her husband had indeed carried out an ultrasound scan on her while she was pregnant, without her consent. As a result of that discovery she launched a legal case against both him and the hospital, which is still making its way through the notoriously slow Indian courts at the time I interview her, ten years after the birth of her daughters. Her husband and the hospital have both strongly denied her allegations.

      Now long-separated from her husband and awaiting a divorce, Mitu has become famous in India for being among the first women to take this kind of legal action. Taking her campaign across the country has confirmed to her just how widespread a problem this is, blind to class or religion. ‘I’m fighting because I don’t want my daughters to go through this. Women are wanted as wives and girlfriends, but not as daughters,’ she says. ‘Society has to change.’

      However well-hidden the selective abortions, murders and abuse of mothers and their daughters, the countrywide statistics don’t lie. Reality is laid bare in the grotesquely uneven sex ratios. The 2015 United Nations report The World’s Women says, ‘For those countries in which the sex ratio falls close to or below the parity line, it can be assumed that discrimination against girls exists.’

      It is a situation familiar to Joy Lawn, director of the Centre for Maternal, Adolescent, Reproductive and Child Health at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. ‘You go to hospitals in South Asia and there can be whole wards of kids with illnesses, and you will find 80 per cent of them are boys, because the girls aren’t being brought to the hospital,’ she tells me. A similar gender imbalance was uncovered in a 2002 study in Nepal by public health researchers Miki Yamanaka and Ann Ashworth, also from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. They looked at how much work children are expected to do to support their families, and found that girls worked twice as long as boys, and that their work was also heavier.

      The effects that society can have on gender differences are profound, and include the taking of life itself. What makes the mortality figures even more shocking is that, contrary to assumptions about women being the weaker sex, a baby girl is statistically more robust than a baby boy. She’s naturally better built to live. As scientists explore the female body in fuller detail, they are learning just how powerful a girl’s survival edge is – even in a world that doesn’t always want her.

      ‘Pretty much at every age, women seem to survive better than men.’

      We often think of males as being the tougher and more powerful sex. It’s true that men are on average six inches taller and have around double the upper-body strength of women. But then, strength can be defined in different ways. When it comes to the most basic instinct of all – survival – women’s bodies tend to be better equipped than men’s.

      The difference is there from the very moment a child is born.

      ‘When we were there on the neonatal unit and a boy came out, you were taught that, statistically, the boy is more likely to die,’ explains Joy Lawn. Besides her academic research into child health, she has worked in neonatal medicine in the United Kingdom and as a paediatrician in Ghana. The first month following birth is the time at which humans are at their greatest risk of death. Worldwide, a million babies die on the day of their birth every year. But if they receive exactly the same level of care, females are statistically less likely to die than males. Lawn’s research encompasses data from across the globe, giving the broadest picture possible of infant mortality. And having researched the issue in such depth, she concludes that boys are at around a 10 per cent greater risk than girls in that first month – and this is at least partly, if not wholly, for biological reasons.

      Thus, in South Asia, as elsewhere in the world, the mortality figures should be in favour of girls. The fact that they’re not even equal, but are skewed in favour of boys, means that girls’ natural power to survive is being forcibly degraded by the societies they are born into. ‘If you have parity in your survival rates, it means you aren’t looking after girls,’ says Lawn. ‘The biological risk is against the boy, but the social risk is against the girl.’

      Elsewhere, child mortality statistics bear this out. For every thousand live births in sub-Saharan Africa, ninety-eight boys compared with eighty-six girls die by the age of five. Research Lawn and her colleagues published in the journal Pediatric Research in 2013 confirmed that a boy is 14 per cent more likely to be born prematurely than a girl, and is more likely to suffer disabilities ranging from blindness and deafness to cerebral palsy when he’s at the same stage of prematurity as a girl. In the same journal in 2012 a team from King’s College London reported that male babies born very prematurely are more likely to stay longer in hospital, to die, or to suffer brain and breathing problems.

      ‘I always thought that it was physically mediated, because boys are slightly bigger, but I think it’s also biological susceptibility to injury,’ says Lawn. One explanation for more boys being born preterm is that mothers expecting boys are, for reasons unknown, more likely to have placental problems and high blood pressure. Research published by scientists from the University of Adelaide in the journal Molecular Human Reproduction in 2014 showed that newborn girls may be healthier on average because a mother’s placenta behaves differently depending on the sex of the baby. With female foetuses, the placenta does more to maintain the pregnancy and increase immunity against infections. Why this is, nobody understands. It could be because, before birth, the normal human sex ratio is slightly skewed towards boys. The difference after birth might simply be nature’s way of correcting the balance.

      But the reasons could also be more complicated. After all, a baby girl’s natural survival edge stays with her throughout her entire life. Girls aren’t just born survivors, they grow up to be better survivors too.

      ‘Pretty much at every age, women seem to survive better than men,’ confirms Steven Austad, chair of the biology department at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, who is an international expert on ageing. He describes women as being more ‘robust’. It’s a phenomenon so clear and undeniable that some scientists believe understanding it may hold the key to human longevity.

      At the turn of the millennium, Austad began to investigate exactly what it is that helps women outlive men at all stages of life. ‘I wondered if this is a recent phenomenon. Is this something that’s only true in industrialised countries in the twentieth century and twenty-first century?’ Digging through the Human Mortality Database, a collection of longevity records from around the world founded by German and American researchers in 2000, he was surprised to discover that the phenomenon really does transcend time and place.

      The database now covers thirty-eight СКАЧАТЬ