While #GirlDad trends, US sex-selective abortion is on the rise
In the wake of basketball star and father-of-four-daughters Kobe Bryant’s death, #GirlDad has gone viral on social media with fathers sharing the unique joy of raising daughters. However, in many parts of the world, fewer girls are born than boys today because of sex-selective abortion.
Demographics experts say that “large-scale female feticide” has also occurred in the U.S. in the last decade, in a new analysis published Jan. 27.
“These new data are worrisome, if not alarming—for they demonstrate that large-scale female feticide has been taking place among certain U.S. sub-populations over the past decade,” researchers Nicholas Eberstadt and Evan Abramsky found when they looked at U.S. birth statistics.
“The ‘global war against baby girls’ has opened a front in the United States of America,” they said.
The phenomenon of mass female feticide in Asia over the last 40 years has been driven by easily available or unconditional abortion access, cultural preferences for boys, and inexpensive prenatal gender determination technology, Eberstadt explains.
While the natural biological sex ratio at birth hovers around 103-105 boys born for every 100 baby girls, in China and India the ratios hit 115 and 111 respectively in 2017.
With the sex ratio skewed in the two most populous countries in the world, sex-selective abortion accounts for millions of “missing baby girls” each year.
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