According to UN statistics, there are 117 million girls missing around the world. Where have they gone? Many of them are left on the sides of roads, drowned, maimed and thrown in trash bins. But even more of them have been aborted.
The reason? They were girls, not boys.
Sex-selective abortion, also colloquially known as “gendercide,” is a huge problem across Asia. A traditional preference for sons, combined with harsh population control measures, has led to the wholesale destruction of little girls. This destruction that has left places like China in demographic turmoil, as young men are beginning to outnumber young women by substantial margins.
With immigration, the problem is also beginning to spread to the United States, as well.
The raw numbers (the sex-ratios and number of births) came from the U.S. Census Bureau.
We downloaded our data from the years 2000-2014. We then controlled for life expectancy and calculated the expected natural sex-ratio for each country in each given year.*
Using these numbers, we calculated from the number of babies born each year, how many male babies should have been born and how many female babies should have been born. We then used the actual sex-ratio to determine the number of male and female births in each country in each year.
We then took the difference between the number of girls that should have been borne given the country’s natural sex ratio and the number of girls that were actually born. We use this number as an estimate for how many girls were aborted because of their gender in each country by year.
There is a more in-depth explanation of the method we used in “Sex Selection in China and its Demographic Causes.”
Join the domestic and international effort to ban sex-selective abortion in our country and around the world.
Our president, Steve Mosher, testified before the Congressional sub-committee in opposition to Sex-Selective Abortion.
BILL STATUS: Feb. 16, 2012: Committee Consideration and Mark-up Session Held. (View full timeline.)
Our videos, press releases, and writings on the subject have helped inform the public about the seriousness of this problem. (See “Learn More”, below.)