Sex-selective abortion and infanticide

Sex-selective abortion is the practice of aborting a fetus after a determination (usually by ultrasound but also rarely by amniocentesis or another procedure) that the fetus is an undesired sex. Sex selective infanticide is the practice of selective infanticide against infants of an undesired sex.

Family sex selection is most common in societies where a large dowry must be paid on marriage. In these societies, families will favour males, as they do not have to pay a dowry on marriage. Some hunter gatherers also practice female infanticide, as males have a higher death rate than females. Male deselection is less common than female deselection, but it would be expected to be seen most amongst poor people and in cultures with bride price. Societies that practice sex selection in favor of males (sometimes called son preference or female deselection) are quite common, especially in Asia; sex selection in favor of females appears to be rare or non-existent.

Sex-selective abortion was rare before the late 20th century because of the difficulty of determining the sex of the fetus before birth, but ultrasound has made it easy. However, prior to this, parents would alter family sex compostion through infanticide. It is believed to be responsible for at least part of the skewed birth statistics in favor of males in mainland China, India, Taiwan, and South Korea. Although the practice is often illegal, laws against it are extremely difficult to enforce because there is often no practical way to determine the parents' true motivation for seeking an abortion. This also makes the issue a difficult one to study as people will rarely discuss the issue openly with strangers.

China
Sex-selective infanticide appears to have been practiced at various times in Chinese history such as the Qing dynasty due to population pressures. Sex-selective infanticide appears to occur infrequently in China today. However, there is a strong imbalance in sex ratios in China as well as Japan, India, and Taiwan, probably the result of sex-selective abortion. In addition, there appears to be some sex-selective abandonment of infants to circumvent China's one child policy.

Female deselection is common in China: Chinese tradition says that most parents want their first child to be born a male. Female deselection is also due to deeply rooted Confucian traditions, and Chinese parents desire sons in order to make familial propagation, security for the elderly, labor provision, and performance of ancestral rites. China calls the female deselection situation the "missing girl" problem.

Parents may wish for a male child because in many cultures only a male will carry on the family name (traditionally when a bride gets married she effectively becomes a member of the groom's family), because they believe that a male is needed for work, or because they wish a male to earn an income needed to support the parents in their old age.

In response to sex-selective abortions, Mainland China has made it illegal for a physician to reveal the sex of a fetus. A non-abortive alternative is sex-selective abandonment, which is also evident in China. Most children (about 95 percent of them) in Chinese orphanages are able-bodied girls with living biological parents. These infants were abandoned by their biological parents and sent to orphanages for adoption just because they are female. Many abandoned Chinese girls have been adopted by the westerners and brought to the United States or Canada, while some others have been adopted domestically by childless Chinese couples.

India
The popularity of female deselection in India could be attributed to socioeconomic reasons. There is a belief by certain people in India that female children are inherently less worthy because they leave home and family when they marry. The high number of "dowry deaths" (about 7,000 were reported in India in 2003), in which brides are murdered by their grooms' family members or commit suicide after suffering abuse and neglect, is also a major factor in gender preference.

Studies in India have indicated three factors of female deselection in India, which are the economic utility, sociocultural utility, and religious functions. The factor as to economic utility is that studies indicate that sons are more likely than daughters to provide family farm labor or provide in or for a family business, earn wages, and give old-age support for parents. Upon marriage, a son makes a daughter-in-law an addition and asset to the family providing additional assistance in household work and brings an economic reward through dowry payments, while daughters get married off and merit an economic penalty through dowry charges. The sociocultural utility factor of female deselection is that, as in China, in India's patrilineal and patriarchal system of families is that having at least one son is mandatory in order to continue the familial line, and many sons constitute additional status to families. The final factor of female deselection is the religious functions that only sons are allowed to provide, based on Hindu tradition. Hindu tradition says that sons are mandatory in order to kindle the funeral pyre of their late parents and to assist in the soul salvation.

It is currently illegal to determine the sex of a child during pregnancy using ultra-sound scans. Laboratories are prohibited to reveal the fetus's sex during such scans. While most established labs comply with the law, determined persons can find a cheaper lab that would tell them what they want. Like the Chinese, the Indians also use the postnatal alternative, which is sex-selective infanticide. Some turn to people called Dais, traditional midwives, historically female, who offer female deselection, letting the baby boys live and killing the baby girls by giving them a sharp jerk, that is, turning them upside-down and snapping their spinal cords, and then declaring them stillborn.

The Lancet, a British medical journal, reported in early 2006 that there may have been close to 10 million female fetuses aborted in India over the past 20 years. This is extrapolated partly on the basis of reduction of female-to-male sex ratio from 945 per 1000 in 1991 to 927 per 1000 in 2001. The female-to-male sex ratio is even lower in cases where a couple has had a previous daughter, but no sons, dropping to 759 to 1000 for the second child if the first was a daughter, and 719 to 1000 for a third child if the first two were both daughters. This article has been challenged by the Indian Medical Association (IMA), which said that it was misleading and failed to take into account restrictions imposed by the courts in 2001. However, some say that the laws have not been effectively upheld, and successful prosecutions remain non-existent. Perhaps contrary to popular expectations, the study also reported that sex selective abortion is more common among the wealthy and among educated women than among the poor and the uneducated. Part of this may be due to their being able to afford the associated expense. In addition, it is what would be expected by evolutionary theory, as a poor male is much less likely to reproduce than a poor female, while the reverse is true for wealthier people, as they have a high probability of attracting multiple females. This can still pose a problem for those wealthier Indians who insist upon having a mate from within their own caste and must sometimes travel hundreds of miles to get a woman.

Other Asian Countries
South Korea also has a birth ratio skewed in favor of males, although the dynamics appear to be slightly different. For first births, the sex ratio is normal, but later births are heavily skewed toward sons. The data may be interpreted to mean that Korean couples choose to limit their families, and are only willing to have a third or fourth child if it is male.

Other Asian countries with skewed male-heavy sex ratios include Pakistan, Taiwan, and Vietnam. Conversely, Japan and Chinese-dominated but heavily urbanized Singapore show little or no tendency toward excess male births. A conference organized by Cicred in Singapore in December 2005 has shown that similar trends are visible also in Caucasian countries.

Inuit
Historical Inuit demographic studies often show a large child sex imbalance, with sometimes nearly two males per female. Most anthropologists attribute this at least in part to widespread female deselection in the form of infanticide. There have been theories that this is to limit population growth, balance adult population ratios (due to the high mortality rates among adult males), a psychological preference for males, or because sons made a greater contribution to their parents' lives by sharing their hunting produce. [Eric Alden Smith; S. Abigail Smith, Inuit Sex-Ratio Variation: Population Control, Ethnographic Error, or Parental Manipulation?, Current Anthropology Vol.35,No.5(Dec.,1994),pp. 595-624]

Elsewhere in the World
Most other parts of the world appear to show no great gender imbalance. Populations of European extraction tend to have a ratio of roughly 105 males per 100 females at birth, but this appears to be genetically determined. For populations of African and Amerindian descent, it is somewhat less; 102 males per 100 females. European cultures show mild son preference, but not to the point of showing large-scale infanticide, which is viewed as unethical. Also, balance is more preferred; if a family has three sons, for example, the parents tend to desire a daughter more as the fourth child. In African cultures, where son preference appears to be the weakest in the world, women are an essential part of the labor force, and bride price is practiced rather than dowry, often in the form of livestock and other tangible wealth.

Other causes of sex ratio imbalances
Sex-selective abortion, infanticide, and abandonment may not be the only causes of sex ratio imbalances in the countries mentioned above. Work by Emily Oster notes that women infected with hepatitis B virus are more likely to bear males than uninfected women. Her 2005 publication in The Journal of Political Economy suggests that in the past, the prevalence of hepatitis infection may have accounted for 75% of the sex ratio imbalance in China, 20% to 50% of the imbalance in the Middle East and Egypt, but less than 20% of the imbalance in India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, and Nepal. This is an active area of research and these findings are controversial. Today's concentrations of sex ratios imbalances are regional -in North-West India or East China- and demographic -among women whose first child was a girl and do not correspond at all to known epidemiological features.

Consequences
It is estimated that by 2020 there could be more than 35 million young 'surplus males' in China and 25 million in India.