The war on girls is over, or at least in retreat. That is to say, many fewer unborn and newly-born daughters are being killed today than in the recent past in India, China and other Asian countries where the practice was once commonplace.
It may be difficult for Westerners to believe, but many cultures have a preference for boys over girls.
This improvement is due to the prominence of public information campaigns and exhortations by public officials, as well as geographic and socio-economic changes.
Roughly 126 million girls are missing globally because of boy preference. That includes 45 million girls in India alone. Some die of neglect after being born, but most are snuffed out via ultrasound scans and abortion.
As a recent Economist piece on this topic explained, even in nature the sex ratio at birth is a bit skewed toward boys. But son preference has led to large discrepancies in some regions. In China in 2010, for example, 120 boys were born for every 100 girls.
This phenomenon has tended to be a bigger problem in rural villages, where boys are prized for their ability to do manual labor, and in places where daughters move out of their parents’ houses when they get married.
Son preference is also stronger in societies with low birth rates: If you’re going to have five or six kids, as most Nigerian women do, for example, then chances are you’re going to have a boy so there’s no need to try to meddle with the process.
But now the trend of eliminating baby girls is reversing. The Economist notes that in South Korea, the ratio has closed dramatically to almost a balance. In China, the ratio of boys to girls has dropped from 121 boys to 100 girls in 2004 to 114:100 in 2014. And in the Indian provinces where this problem was worst, there has been improvement, and more recent birth data in India shows that the sex ratio at birth has narrowed.
Other countries in the region, including Vietnam, Armenia and Azerbaijan, are also moving in the direction of balance.
Governments did their part in making the situation worse. China’s recently loosened one-child policy left many couples feeling that their only option was to have a boy, who would carry on the family name and take care of them in their dotage. Governments have realized that too many boys means many of them won’t be able to find mates and that societies with lots of single males are usually more violent.
How to account for this rather dramatic reversal? Governments have passed laws prohibiting sex-selection abortion. Another factor: urbanization, which tends to make women more financially independent and thus better able, eventually, to care for elderly parents. TV shows in India are inculcating in their viewers an appreciation for daughters.
Experts now predict that sex ratios will continue to normalize until they return to a natural level. That’s good news for girls and thus good news for boys and society at large.
Daniel Allott is deputy commentary editor for the Washington Examiner
