The elimination of baby girls through sex-selective abortions will lead to an increase in the gender gap by 4.7 million over the next nine years, according to a report Wednesday in MedicalNewsToday.
The current widening of the gender gap at the expense of girls is added to the estimated 45 million “missing” female births between 1970 and 2017 as a consequence of sex-selective abortions, the report stated.
“Skewed levels of the sex ratio at birth (SRB) due to sex-selective abortions have been observed in several countries since the 1970s,” declares an August 4 study published in BMJ Global Health. “They will lead to long-term sex imbalances in more than one-third of the world’s population with yet unknown social and economic impacts on affected countries.”
“Sex-selective abortions, the main mechanism behind sex selection, have been observed across a range of various countries from Southeast Europe to South and East Asia,” the study found “They lead to a hike in the sex ratio at birth (SRB; namely the ratio of male to female live births) above its natural (biological) level and to the emergence of a surplus of male births.”
Along with excess female mortality, “this SRB inflation is now a major contributor to the ‘missing women’, a concept first described by Sen to refer to a population with much fewer females than males,” it declares.
The study notes that prenatal sex selection accounts for “about half” of the recent deficit of females in the world during the previous decades, adding that a male-biased sex structure in a society “could lead to demographic issues such as marriage squeeze with lack of marriageable females.”
“Fewer-than-expected females in a population could result in elevated levels of antisocial behaviour and violence, and may ultimately affect long-term stability and social sustainable development,” it adds.
The study also cites a 2020 report by the United Nations Population Fund that deemed the bias in favor of male children “a symptom of entrenched gender inequality, which harms whole societies.”
“The preference for sons over daughters may be so pronounced in some societies that couples will go to great lengths to avoid giving birth to a girl or will fail to care for the health and well-being of a daughter they already have in favour of their son,” the U.N. declared.
As Breitbart News reported in 2015, China has been trafficking young girls from Vietnam to be sold as wives in an effort to compensate for the dearth of Chinese women of marriage age due to sex-selective abortions.
According to reports, Vietnamese villages near the Chinese border have become a hunting ground for people smugglers, where girls as young as 13 are trapped, drugged or lured under false pretenses and then trafficked across the border.
Chinese men are willing to pay upwards of $3,000 for a Vietnamese bride because the cultural similarities between the two countries make the women especially desirable, the report noted.
As a consequence of 40 years of its draconian one-child (now “two-child”) policy, China has the greatest gender imbalance of any country in the world, with the number of eligible males of marrying age outnumber their female counterparts by some 30 million.
Since most Chinese couples prefer having a son, many abort their baby girls in the hope that the next child will be a boy. This practice has radically skewed China’s gender ratio, leaving a significant deficiency of women vis-à-vis men.
“Sex-selective abortion is the ultimate violence against females,” said Reggie Littlejohn, President of Women’s Rights Without Frontiers. “Aborting a baby just because she is a girl is the ultimate act of gender discrimination.”
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