Is banning sex-selection the best approach for reducing prenatal discrimination?

ABSTRACT

Pressure to ban prenatal sex-selection has grown with rising sex ratios at birth in some countries. Governments feel pressured to act, and bans seem an immediate step they can take. However, such bans have been in place for some time in South Korea, China, and India and the available evidence suggests they are difficult to implement and have limited impact. This is indicated most clearly in the Chinese census data, which throw light on the mixed effects of a very intensive effort to implement the ban. Studies show that bans on sex-selection have negative consequences for unwanted girls and their mothers. By contrast, other studies have shown that other policies – including mass messaging and measures to increase gender equity – show fairly quick impact in reducing son preference and increasing parental investment in girls. Such policies can permanently lower son preference and sex-selection, while also improving girls’ life-chances.

KEYWORDS:

• Sex-selection
• abortion
• son preference
• gender equity
• East Asia
• South Asia

Acknowledgements

This study was partly supported by the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Center for Child Health and Human Development grant R24-HD041041 Maryland Population Research Center.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 Constitutional Court of Korea, cited in Library of Congress, 2008.

2 Government of India, 1994.

3 Article 24 of the PCPNDT Act, (Government of India, 1994).

4 Government of India, 1994; 2002.

5 Paragraph 30–31 of the PCPNDT Act (Government of India, 2002).

6 This estimate is derived from the number of abortions in 2005 estimated by a survey of health facilities (Ahn et al., 2012), and the number of livebirths recorded for that year by the vital registration system (Korean Statistical Information Service), and may be an underestimate since abortions tend to be under-reported. Many other sources also point to the high proportion of pregnancies aborted in South Korea. See for example Choe and Kim (2007) and Sung (2012).

7 Some estimates of the consequences of unsafe abortion have been made by Singh (2006).

8 Paragraph 30–31 of the PCPNDT Act (Government of India, 2002).

9 Park and Cho (1995, pp. 75–77) noted that selective abortion reduces unwanted children, improving girls’ life-chances.

10 See for example Choe (1987) on South Korea, Das Gupta (1987) on North India, Muhuri and Preston (1991) on Bangladesh, Li et al. (2004) on China, and Lin et al. (2014) on Taiwan.

11 See for example Li et al. (2004) on China; Treleaven et al. (2016) on Vietnam; Chen, Huq, and D’Souza (1981) on Bangladesh; Das Gupta (1987) on Northwest India; and Hazarika (2000) on Pakistan.

12 Given that fertility still has a considerable way to decline in populous parts of north-central India that already manifest sex-selection, Roy and Chattopadhyay (2012) project that India’s overall sex ratio at birth is likely to increase by 2026.

13 Sung (2012, pp. 297–298); Kim (2004; pp. 870–871).

14 Korean Statistical Information Service (kosis.kr/eng/, last accessed March 2015).

15 See, http://go.nationalpartnership.org/site/News2?abbr=daily2_&page=NewsArticle&id=12088

16 Korean Statistical Information Service (kosis.kr/eng/, last accessed March 2015).

17 Chung and Das Gupta (2007).

18 Shin (2006, 2014); ILO (1989); Chung and Das Gupta (2007).

19 Kim (2013); Na and Kwon (2015).

20 Kim (2004, p. 871); Chun (2018).

21 Chung and Das Gupta (2007); Chun (2018).

22 Chung and Das Gupta (2007)

23 6700 cases were investigated between August 2011 and May 2012, of which 5800 cases had been concluded and about 2400 people punished (Guo et al., 2016).

24 The rise in sex-selection amongst first births cannot be attributed to tighter implementation of the family planning policy, as the estimated Total Fertility Rate changed little during this period: 1.44 in 1999 and 1.37 in 2009 (National Bureau of Statistics of China 2000, 2010).

25 See for example Bhat & Zavier, 2003; Pande & Astone, 2007; and Gaudin, 2011.

26 See for example the Meena campaign launched in 1998 (UNICEF, 2019), and the Beti Bachao campaign launched in 2015 (Government of India, 2019).

27 Laws on equal inheritance for girls and boys were passed in India in 1956, and strengthened in 2005 (Deininger et al., 2013), in China in 1985 (Consulate-General of the People’s Republic of China in New York., n.d.), South Korea in 1989 (Shin, 2006).

Laws encouraging sons and daughters to care for their parents include Article 49 of China’s 1982 Constitution (Government of the People’s Republic of China, n.d.), Vietnam’s 2000 law (Vietnam Law and Legal Forum., 2006), and India in 2007 (Government of India, 2007).