Evidence of sex selection

last updated 8 January 2015

Delhi

India is missing around 10 million girls, a British study revealed this week. Over the two decades that prenatal gender determination has been possible, Indians have given birth to about a half-million fewer girls each year than would be expected. Aborting fetuses based on sex is illegal in India, but is believed to be common. The study in the journal Lancet backs up that impression. It found that among families whose first child was a boy, the sex of the second child was equally split between boys and girls. But when the eldest child was a girl, the second child was far more likely to be a boy, suggesting that female fetuses were aborted when the family was trying for a son.