India: Dispute over sex ratio

More than 10m female births in India may have been lost to abortion and sex selection in the past 20 years, research published in the Lancet has claimed.

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

The research, by Prabhat Jha of St Michael’s Hospital at the University of Toronto, Canada, and Rajesh Kumar of the Postgraduate Institute of Medical Research in Chandigarh, India, 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.

Prabhat Jha said conservative estimates in the research suggested half a million girls were being lost each year. ‘If this practice has been common for most of the past two decades since access to ultrasound became widespread, then a figure of 10m missing female births would not be unreasonable.’ In 1994, India banned the use of technology to determine the sex of unborn children and the termination of pregnancies on the basis of gender. Leading campaigners say many of India’s fertility clinics continue to offer a seemingly legitimate facade for a multi-billion pound racket and that gender determination is still big business in India.

However, a top Indian doctors’ association disputed the report. The Indian Medical Association said pre-birth gender checks had waned since a Supreme Court crackdown in 2001. A spokesman acknowledged that prenatal selections used to take place, but said they were not as widespread as before and that the Lancet report was exaggerated. ‘This has not been happening for the past four or five years after strict laws were put in place,’ the spokesman, Dr Narendra Saini, said. Other experts say it is impossible that India could have lost 10m females. ‘If there were half a million feticides a year, the sex ratio would have been very skewed indeed,’ said Prof SC Gulati of Delhi’s Institute of Economic Growth.

India ‘loses 10m female births’ BBC, 9 January 2006; India ‘lost birth’ study disputed BBC, 11 January 2006. Low male-to-female sex ratio of children born in India: national survey of 1.1 million households Jha P, Kumar R, Vasa P, Dhingra N, Thiruchelvam D, Moineddin R. The Lancet - Vol. 367, Issue 9506, 21 January 2006, Pages 211-218