[ourmaninBusan]

http://iht.com/articles/2006/01/09/news/india.php

It's a 3-page article, so here is the short version:

In India, Gender Abortions in Millions

By Amelia Gentleman International Herald Tribune
MONDAY, JANUARY 9, 2006

NEW DELHI
As many as 10 million female fetuses may have been aborted in India
over the past 20 years as families try to secure a male heir, according to
a study published Monday in The Lancet, the British medical journal.

In the two decades since the wide availability of ultrasound equipment,
which allows prenatal determination of sex, the number of girls born in
India has declined steeply, despite a law banning doctors from revealing
the sex of a fetus to parents.

Although the routine aborting of female fetuses has been widely documented,
the study puts new light on the scale of the practice. Experts in India said
Monday that they hoped the study would prompt the government to enforce
the laws against the practice that are already on the books.

Campaigners have been trying to alert the government to the potential long-
term social impact of the phenomenon warning that, among other problems, it
will make it harder for men to find wives. In China, where a one-child policy is
strictly enforced, prenatal sex selection has resulted in an estimated 40
million bachelors.

"We conservatively estimate that prenatal sex determination and selective
abortion accounts for 0.5 million missing girls yearly,"
Dr. Prabhat Jha, a public health professor at the University of Toronto, who
headed the research team, said in a statement. "If this practice has been
common for most of the past two decades since access to ultrasound
became widespread, then a figure of 10 million missing female births would
not be unreasonable."

The preference for sons has distorted the gender ratio throughout India....In 1991 there were some 945 women for every 1,000
men. The ratio dropped to 927 females per 1,000 males in 2001.

Jha's team found that parents were more likely to abort a female fetus
if the previous child had been a girl. ..."To have a daughter is socially and
emotionally accepted if there is a son, but a daughter's arrival is often
unwelcome if the couple already have a daughter," Professor Shirish Sheth,
of the Breach Candy Hospital in Mumbai, India, wrote in a commentary on the
findings.

"Daughters are regarded as a liability," the professor continued.
"Because she will eventually belong to the family of her future husband,
expenditure on her will benefit others. In some communities where the
custom of dowry prevails, the cost of her dowry could be phenomenal."

[edit]

Dr. Sabhu George, who has been researching the phenomenon for the
past 21 years, said the data from the study did not surprise him.

"Over the next five years, we could see over one million
fetuses eliminated every year," George said. "The future is frightening."