The slippery slope

Selective abortions result in 32m excess males in China

PARIS: Selective abortion in favour of males has left China with 32 million more boys than girls, creating an imbalance that will remain for decades, warned a paper published by the British Medical Journal (BMJ) on Friday.

The study provided ammunition for those experts who predicted that China’s obsession with a male heir would sow bitter fruit, as men facing a life of bachelorhood would eventually have to fight for a bride. “Although some imaginative and extreme solutions have been suggested, nothing can be done now to prevent this imminent generation of excess men,” says the paper. In most countries, males slightly outnumber females, with an average of 103 to 107 male births for every 100 female births.

Widened: But in China and other Asian countries, the gender ratio has widened sharply as the traditional preference for boys was reinforced by the availability of cheap ultrasound diagnostics and abortion. This has enabled Chinese couples to use abortions to prevent a female birth, a practice that was officially condemned as well as being made illegal.

In the paper, Zhejiang University professors Wei Xing Zhu and Li Lu and Therese Hesketh of the University College London found that in 2005 alone, China had more than 1.1 million excess male births. Amongst the Chinese aged below 20, the greatest gender imbalances existed amongst one-to-four-year-olds, where there were 124 male to 100 female births, with 126 to 100 in rural areas, they found.

One-child policy: However, an additional factor leading to the gender imbalance has been the Chinese government’s “one-child” policy. In general, parents who had a second child were liable to pay a fine and contribute disproportionately towards the second child’s education. The gender ratio gap was especially big in provinces where the one-child policy was strictly enforced and in rural areas. Jiangxi and Henan provinces had ratios of over 140 male births compared to female births in the one-to-four-year-olds age group.

When it came to second births, the sex ratio was even higher, with 143 male births to 100 female births. It peaked at a massive 192 boys to 100 girls in the Jiangsu province. afp