![Sample our Social Sciences journals, sign in here to start your FREE access for 14 days]({"type":"image" , "src" : "/sda/110822/TOC-Subject-Sample-2021-Social-Sciences.jpg"})
Abstract
Because sex-selective abortions are generally conducted during the second term of the pregnancy, timing of abortion can be used as an indirect way of studying sex-selection by abortion. We examined the likelihood of having a first-trimester vs. second-trimester abortion among a group of 885 married women who had an abortion in an obstetric hospital in Hanoi in 2003. In the absence of sex-selection by abortion, the number and sex of living children should not affect the timing of abortion. Results indicate that women with more children, particularly those with more daughters or without a son, were more likely to undergo a second-term abortion than a first-term abortion. We estimate that, in 2003, 2 per cent of all abortions to women with at least one living child were intended to avoid the birth of a female.
Notes
1. Danièle Bélanger is Associate Professor, The University of Western Ontario, Department of Sociology, London, ON N6A 5C2, Canada. E-mail: [email protected]. Khuat Thi Hai Oanh, MD, is Senior Researcher, The Institute for Social Development Studies, Hanoi, Vietnam. E-mail: [email protected]
2. An earlier version of this paper was presented at the Annual Meeting of the Canadian Population Society in 2007 in Saskatoon, Canada. We are grateful to Paul Ekwaru for his excellent suggestions for improving the paper. We also wish to thank Russell Wilkins, Don Kerr, and Alain Gagnon for the useful feedback they provided on an earlier version, and Gale Cassidy and Andrea Flynn for their careful editing of our manuscript. Finally, we thank the anonymous reviewers of Population Studies for very constructive comments that substantially strengthened the paper.