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Unnatural Selection: Sex Selection and Asia's 160 Millon 'Missing' Females

Thanks mainly to sex selective abortion, there are over 160 million females missing from Asia’s population and an unknown number missing from other continents. Here, Mara Hvistendahl '02 examines how this gap is transforming communities, leading to everything from a spike in bride-buying to an increase in crime — and details how the West played a role in sparking this global problem.

Hvistendahl is a Beijing-based correspondent for Science Magazine and the author of Unnatural Selection: Choosing Boys Over Girls, and the Consequences of a World Full of Men (2011). Her award-winning writing has been published in Harper's, Scientific American, Popular Science, The Financial Times, and Foreign Policy. She has appeared as a commentator on NPR, MSNBC, and the BBC, and taught journalism at Fudan University in Shanghai.

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