The world’s 23.1 MILLION missing women: Gender-bias abortions in India and China have led to uneven birth rates of boys and girls, study claims
- 10.6 million of the ‘missing females’ are in India and 11.9 million come from China
- China’s single-child policy added to the desire to have a boy and not a girl
- Comes from a five-year study analysing survey and census population data
- Peaked in 2005 and China’s birth ratio was 118:110 in favour of male births
Pressures in countries such as China and India for people to produce boys and not girls has led to a spike in gender-based abortions, a shock study has found.
There are now 23.1 million ‘missing’ females in the world as a result of people terminating pregnancies because the child would have been born female.
Approximately 10.6 million of these so-called ‘missing females’ are in India and 11.9 million are from China.
Members of the Singaporean researcher team say that the added pressure of China’s single-child policy and the desire of parents to have a boy compounded the problem.
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Sex ratio at birth in 2017 and the number of missing female births during 1970-2017. The study, by a team of researchers in Singapore, found that as a result of the mounting favouritism for male children in some locations. the global gender ratio shifted up to 118:100 in favour of males in 2005
A five-year study gathered information from 202 countries around the world, including a dozen nations where boys were favoured over girls at some point in their history.
The study, by a team of researchers in Singapore, found that as a result of the mounting favouritism for male children in some locations. the global gender ratio shifted up to 118:100 in favour of males.
It has exasperated an already existing quirk of nature which means for every 200 births, 105 will likely be male.
This inherent male bias remains a mystery to scientists but it has long been speculated to balance out how much longer women live compared to men.
Women have a greater life expectancy in most countries. In the UK, the Office for National Statistics reveals a newborn baby boy could expect to live 79.2 years and a newborn baby girl 82.9 years
And for every male that reaches the age of 100 there are four women who also become centenarians.
This natural skewing has now, the study claims, undergone a modern-era shift forcing the world’s gender balance even further along this inherently sexist scale.
China, according to the study, reached peak gender favouritism in 2005 and the repercussions are now beginning to be felt as the global super powers are suffering from a lack of women reaching reproductive age. The additional Chinese restraints of only one child per family, which stood for more than 30 years, will likely worsen the issue (stock)
The long-term study, published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, gathered data from birth records, census information and survey responses.
China, according to the study, reached peak gender favouritism in 2005 and the repercussions are now beginning to be felt as the global super powers are suffering from a lack of women reaching reproductive age.
The additional Chinese restraints of only one child per family, which stood for more than 30 years, will likely worsen the issue.
‘It’s an incredibly important contribution,’ Darrell Bricker, a Canadian political scientist, told Wired.
‘If the only part of the population who can produce new kids are women under the age of 45, and a whole bunch of them are missing, it’s going to have an obvious impact on the fertility of a population.’
In his recently published book, Empty Planet, he claims we are more likely to run out of people than we are to have too many people.
Why did China once have a one-child policy?
For nearly 40 years, each Chinese couple was only allowed to have one baby due to the country’s strict one-child policy (file photo)
In the 1950s after the Communist Party of China took over the country, Mao Zedong, the first Chairman of People’s Republic of China, believed in the phrase ‘there is strength in numbers’.
The powerful leader encouraged post-war Chinese women to give birth to more children. He awarded those who have more than five offspring the shining title of a ‘glorious mother’.
As a result, between 1950 and 1960, approximately 200 million people were born in China, more than a third of the nation’s population in its founding year 1949 (542 million).
In order to control the quickly expanding population, the State Council of China unveiled a revolutionary family-planning guideline in 1973, encouraging couples to have a maximum of two children, with a four-year gap between the pair.
A decade later, a mandatory one-child policy was launched with the aim of keeping the Chinese population under 1.2 billion at the end of the 20th century.
The ruthless policy was strictly enforced in urban areas.
If a woman was pregnant with her second child, she would be asked to abort it.
If the couple decided to keep it, a fine would be applied – usually three times the family’s annual income.
Selective demographics in the country, such as rural residents and minority groups, however, were not bound by the policy.
On January 1, 2014, the Chinese authorities launched a so-called ‘selective two-child policy’, which allowed couples to have a second baby as long as either of them is a single child.
China officially started its so-called ‘universal two-child policy’ on January 1, 2016.
Chinese family-planning authorities predict that an extra three million babies would be born annually between 2016 and 2021 due to the shift of the policy.
