Can India achieve a balance of sexes at birth?

摘要

The masculine nature of the Indian population, as indicated by the lower than normal sex ratio (defined as female-to-male ratio in India), has been a matter of concern since the first Indian census in 1871.1 Almost a century and a half later, the sex ratio in children aged 0-6 years in India-of 915 girls to 1000 boys-is the lowest ratio recorded since data became available in 1961. The steady decline in the ratio is surprising, and counterintuitive, in view of India's progress in recent decades in improving the levels of female literacy and increases in income per person. In The Lancet, Prabhat Jha and colleagues3 present a timely analysis of trends in sex ratio at birth in India, and show that the ratio for second-order births, conditional on the first born being a girl, fell from 906 girls per 1000 boys in 1990, to 836 girls per 1000 boys in 2005. On the basis of this finding, the investigators estimate that there have been between 3.1 and 6 million abortions of female fetuses in the past decade.