India: Gender imbalance highest among the affluent
For many years, India and other countries in Asia have been seeing an unnaturally large preponderance of boys over girls. Such unbalanced sex ratios are attributable to sex-selection abortions motivated by cultural and financial preferences for male children.
A study led by Dr S.V. Subramanian of the Harvard School of Public Health has found that, in India, the sex-ratio imbalance is highest among the wealthy and well-educated.
In India, where families have traditionally preferred son, the male-female ratio increases with the level of education. The odds of having a boy compared to a girl is 25 percent higher in houses where the head of the family has completed schooling.
“We found that households where the head of the house has completed schooling had an increased ratio of having a male child compared to houses with heads receiving no formal education,” S.V. Subramanian, lead author of the study released last month, told IANS.
The male-female ratio also increases with income, the study found. Higher income groups are 14 percent more likely to prefer a boy to a girl while in the poorer sections the preference may be just four percent more.
In 1994, India passed into law the Pre-Natal Diagnostic Techniques Act aimed at inhibiting the use of medical technology in support of sex-selection abortions. Apparently, the law has failed to achieve its purpose.
Dr Subramanian hypothesizes that low-income families have the same cultural and financial preferences for male children as do higher-income families, but do not posses the resources to detect and terminate unborn baby girls.
h/t: LifeSiteNews