Sex-selective Abortions and Infant Mortality in India: The Role of Parents’ Stated Son Preference

Abstract

In India, millions of female foetuses have been aborted since the 1980s alongside an abnormally high infant girl mortality rate; this has generated a vast literature exploring the root causes of son preference. The literature is sparse, however, on how the decisions to abort or neglect girls are made. This paper examines mothers’ and fathers’ respective roles behind those decisions. Using the third National Family and Health Survey (NFHS-3) data, we show that sex-selective abortions are most commonly used if both spouses or if only the fathers prefer sons, while sex-selective neglect is used if only the mothers prefer sons.

Acknowledgements

We thank two anonymous referees and the seminar participants at the University of Nottingham, at the University of Western Australia and at the Australasian Development Economic Workshop for helpful comments. Any mistakes are our own. The data used in this paper is publicly available on The Demographic and Health Surveys (DHS) website and the code is available on request.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. Many of these reasons to prefer sons are also an artefact of son preference. For example, the high status enjoyed by mothers of sons increases the utility of having sons, but the reason why having a son increases women’s status is because of the ingrained son preference in the community. Similarly, the desire to have a son to inherit the ancestral land comes from the tradition that deprives women from land ownership.

2. If a child is to be neglected to death, it is rational to do so as early as possible so as to limit unnecessary investment – such as time and food – in the child and to limit emotional attachment. It is also easier to conceal infanticide and blatant neglect early in life as the mortality risk is at its highest; hence our focus on infant mortality.

3. The relevant questions in NFHS-3 are: ‘If you could go back to the time you did not have any children and could choose exactly the number of children to have in your whole life, how many would that be?’ and ‘How many of these children would you like to be boys, how many would you like to be girls and for how many would it not matter?’.

4. It is common in the literature to look at the sex-ratio of the last birth while studying sex-selective abortions. Focusing on the last birth helps deal with issues we will discuss later on. It should however be kept in mind that the sex-ratio of the last birth is an inflated measure of the level of gender imbalance in the population as many parents are willing to let faith determine the gender of their first born (Jha et al., 2006), parents are more likely to stop childbearing after the birth of a son (Arnold, Kishor, & Roy, 2002) and some parents may shorten birth spacing after the birth of a girl, in the hope of having a son (Arnold, Choe, & Roy, 1998).

5. Descriptive statistics for the dependent and the independent variables are presented in Online Appendix B while variable descriptions are available in Online Appendix C.

6. In a model explaining the percentage of boys desired if the respondent could start over his/her fertility history, estimated using OLS and controlling only for the sex-ratio of ever born children and the gender of the last child, we conclude, for both men and women, that the sex-ratio of ever born children is a significant determinant, but not the gender of the last child in the case of the men’s equation; while, in the case of women, having had a boy as a last birth reduces the percentage of boys desired (results available on request).

7. Given the dichotomous nature of the dependent variable, a Probit model would have been more appropriate. However, the use of OLS has the advantage of allowing us to interpret directly the constant. As a robustness check the model was also estimated using Probit. The main conclusions remain (results available on request).

8. It is, however, possible that parents who had a daughter but are desperate for a son, may end up with very short birth spacing.