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The daughters return A glimmer of hope in the sad tale of sex-selective abortion in India Dec 31st 2011 | from the print edition THE march of sex-selective abortion in Asia seems relentless. Not every society adopts the practice, but those that doand they include the two largest countries on earthhave seen it spread through every social group, unhampered by growing wealth. Indeed, middle-income couples seem more willing and better able to manipulate the sex of their children than are the poor. And they are more likely to want smaller families, increasing the premium on sons in countries where males are seen as more valuable. As a result, richer areas have more sex selection than poorer ones and sex selection tends to rise as countries get richer. In China the sex ratio at birth is much more distorted in rich Shanghai and Guangzhou than in poor Tibet. From 2001-11, Indias GDP more than doubled and the census of 2011 found only 914 girls aged 0-6 for every 1,000 boys, worse even than the abysmal tally in 2001, when there were 927 girls per 1,000 boys. (India counts the sex ratio differently from the rest of the world, which expresses the idea as the number of boys per 100 girls; using the international measure, Indias child sex ratio rose from 108 in 2001 to 109.5 in 2011.) In 2001 India had 6m fewer girls than boys aged 0-6; by 2011 the number had risen to 7m. It has long been assumed the process of reversing sex selection does not happen until countries are richer than India or China are now. One of the few to have succeeded in ending the practice is South Korea, where the sex ratio at birth peaked in 1990 and has since fallen to near-normal levels. South Korea did not manage fully to reverse the trend until its GDP per person had reached about $12,000. Chinas is now $8,400, Indias $3,700. Both countries have been campaigning against sex-selective abortion for years, making it illegal to terminate pregnancies just because parents want a son (or indeed to inform parents of the sex of a fetus), launching save the daughter campaigns, andin Indias caseenlisting Bollywood stars to sing the praises of girls. All, it seems, to no avail. | 
