Gender Selection in India

Read the full BBC article (9 January 2006)

In most countries, women slightly outnumber men, but in the year 2001 for every 1,000 male babies born in India, there were just 933 girls.

Researchers in India and Canada, publishing in the Lancet, report that prenatal selection and selective abortion may causing the loss of 500,000 girls a year. Their research was based on a national survey of 1.1m households in 1998.

They found that there was an increasing tendency to select boys when previous children had been girls. In cases where the preceding child was a girl, the ratio of girls to boys in the next birth was 759 to 1,000. This fell even further when the two preceding children were both girls. Then the ratio for the third child born was just 719 girls to 1,000 boys. However, for a child following the birth of a male child, the gender ratio was roughly equal.

This from an earlier article (18 July, 2003) on the BBC website:

Medical research in India suggests that baby girls are much more likely to die than infant boys, even from illnesses that can be treated.The research, published in the British Medical Journal, was carried out at St Stephen's Hospital in Delhi......The researchers analysed autopsy reports of babies in three socially deprived parts of Delhi over a five-year period and discovered that the overall death rate for girls was almost one-third higher than that for boys. This was particularly the case for sudden, unexplained deaths - three out of four cases were girls. The researchers suggest that some of these deaths may be cases of parents actually killing their female babies.

These trends seems to be the result of Indian cultural tendencies to prefer male over female children, as well as of technological developments which enable families to determine the sex of the fetus and to terminate pregnancy.

I wonder, however, what the social results will be of a society with many more males than females, and with relatively few young women with older sisters? Apparently young men are already finding difficulties in finding marriage partners in some places in India.

I cite this as an case in which knowledge may be critical for development. Health programs, especially those designed by outsiders to benefit Indian populations, must have knowledge of these gender trends and apparent gender biases in the Indian population. Perhaps even more importantly, serious efforts should be undertaken now to project the social and economic consequences of these trends, and to consider alternatives to change the factors contributing to those trends.