Female Foeticide – Chasing Tales

The past
In Karachi, the Edhi Foundation— Pakistan’s largest social welfare organisation — installed cradles outside the gates of its orphanage with a sign reading: Don’t kill the baby, leave the baby alive in the cradle. A newborn girl was found in one of those cradles. Her entire body was blackened. She had been burnt alive, umbilical cord still attached.¹

Of the babies recovered from those cradles, more than 90% are girls.²

In 1990, the Indian economist Amartya Sen published an essay in The New York Review of Books titled “More Than 100 Million Women Are Missing.” The phrase was new. The practice was ancient.³

Sen had noticed something in the census data: across Asia, there were far fewer women than there should be. Women who should have existed did not exist. They had been removed. Female infants are more resilient than male infants, and women outlive men on a level biological playing field.³ Sen called this “missing”. By his original estimate: 100 million. Later research revised the figure upward.

In Classical Greece, fewer than 1% of families documented at Delphi around 200 BCE had two or more daughters.⁴ Daughters were exposed — left outside, on hillsides and in public places, to die of cold and hunger.⁵

In ancient Rome, the practice was routine and documented without shame. In 1 BCE, a Roman man named Hilarion wrote a letter from Alexandria to his pregnant wife Alis. The letter was found on papyrus in Egypt, preserved by dry sand for two thousand years. It reads: if it is a male, let it live; if it is a female, expose it.⁶

In China, Christian missionaries in the sixteenth century documented newborn girls thrown into rivers. In Qing dynasty texts, the term ni nü — “to drown girls” — appears as a routine domestic description.⁷ Drowning, suffocation, starvation, and exposure in baskets placed in trees were all documented methods of eliminating female newborns (A caveat: western missionary accounts, particularly Gabriel Palatre’s widely reproduced 1878 statistics, have been shown to be significantly erroneous — shaped partly by an exoticizing Western gaze that made female infanticide into a “totemic marker of Chinese society.”⁸

The Quran explicitly prohibits female infanticide. It prohibits it perhaps because it was common enough in pre-Islamic Arabia to require prohibition?⁹ The Vedic and ancient Hindu texts of India reference son preference.¹⁰ ¹¹ ¹² Roman law referenced it (it went from a father’s right to capital crime).¹³ ¹⁴ The practice predates every modern state, every modern religion in its current form, and every technology we associate with it.

Sex-selective abortion leaves a specific statistical signature that makes it distinguishable from random variation. In families practising sex selection, ratios at first and second births tend to be close to normal. The distortion appears and amplifies at third and fourth births — specifically in families that have not yet produced a son.¹⁵ ¹⁶ ¹⁷

A five-year study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences¹⁵ in 2019 compiled 10,835 observations across 202 countries and identified twelve countries with statistically significant sex ratio distortions attributable specifically to sex-selective abortion: China, India, Albania, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Georgia, South Korea, Hong Kong, Montenegro, Taiwan, Tunisia, and Vietnam. Of 23 million¹⁸ girls selectively aborted since 1970, 11.9 million were in China and 10.6 million in India. In 2017 alone, 800,000 girls were aborted in China and 671,000 in India. The most recent count, tracking the accumulation since 1970 across twelve countries, is an estimated 142 million “missing” girls and women.¹⁹

Across centuries and cultures, societies have eliminated girls and women.

The logic
In research from 2008, the economist Nancy Qian studied what happened in rural China when the market price of tea rose — because tea-picking rewards the fine motor skills at which women are thought to excel. When female income increased by US$7.70 — roughly ten per cent of average rural household income — the survival rate of girls rose by a full percentage point. When orchard fruit values rose in regions where men dominate the labour, no equivalent improvement occurred.²⁰

Esther Duflo, in her 2012 survey of the relationship between women’s empowerment and economic development published in the Journal of Economic Literature, documented the same mechanism from the other direction in research which also synthesised from Elaina Rose’s 1999 paper “Consumption Smoothing and Excess Female Mortality in Rural India”.²¹ ²² In India, excess female child mortality — deaths of girls that would not have occurred if girls received care equal to boys — spikes during droughts.²³ When a household faces an income shock, girls are the first to be deprioritised.

Most of the 142 million were not aborted. They were neglected into death after they were born — fed less, treated less, counted less.

Abhijit Banerjee and Duflo’s research on how poor households actually make decisions — rather than how economists assume they do — found that the logic driving these outcomes is not irrational within the terms of the society producing it.²⁴ A son carries the family name, inherits property, provides old-age support, and stays. A daughter, under the systems of inheritance and marriage that govern the societies where missing women cluster most densely, functionally becomes the property of her husband’s family upon marriage.²⁴ The parents who fed and educated her receive nothing.²⁴

Their conclusion, after reviewing decades of evidence, is that economic development alone does not fix this. Economic growth does not automatically raise the value of girls. In India, the sex ratio distortion has been worst in the wealthiest states. Punjab and Haryana — India’s richest agricultural states — have among the lowest sex ratios in the country.²⁵ Ultrasound arrived with prosperity, and prosperity enabled families who previously killed girls after birth to instead eliminate them before. Sen called it “high-tech sexism”.²⁶ Duflo characterises it as a market failure that requires “continuous policy commitment to equality for its own sake,”²⁷ because no invisible hand will correct it.

The numbers are not abstract.

In India — where Duflo documented girls being deprioritised first in every household income shock — the national sex ratio is 900 girls per 1,000 boys;²⁸ in Haryana, India’s wealthiest agricultural state, it is 831;²⁸ India’s own Economic Survey counts 63 million missing women,²⁹ and every year 239,000 girls under five die because of their gender (2000-2005).³⁰
In China, the one-child policy combined with ultrasound produced sex ratios of 117 males per 100 females in 2001;³¹ an estimated 11.9 million girls were selectively aborted between 1970 and 2020;¹⁵ the total missing across all causes is 40 million; and the demographic surplus of men left behind has a name — guang gun, “bare branches,” men who will never find wives because their generation’s women were removed before birth.³²³³
In Pakistan, 18% of survey respondents said they did not want even one daughter; the average desired number of sons was 3.05, the average desired number of daughters was 1.15.³⁴ ³⁵
Vietnam’s sex ratio reached 112 in 2006, rising from a natural baseline of 105 in just five years — faster than China or South Korea at their peaks.³⁶
Azerbaijan reached 116 males per 100 females. Twelve countries across five continents, four major religions, every income bracket.³⁷ ³⁸

The variable they share is not poverty, not religion, not geography. It is the uncorrected price of a girl.

In October 2023, the UK Office for National Statistics published data analysed by the Department of Health and Social Care.³⁹ Other research found a statistically significant imbalance in births to Indian mothers in the United Kingdom between 2021 and 2025: 118 boys born for every 100 girls, against a national average of 105. At third births specifically, the ratio reached 118:100 in both 2023–24 and 2024–25.⁴⁰ Researchers estimate approximately 400 sex-selective abortions occurred in the UK between 2017 and 2021,³⁹ a statistically significant imbalance consistent with patterns of sex selection.

The present
South Korea is the one country in the twelve that has demonstrably reversed the trend.⁴¹ A sustained government campaign, legal enforcement against illegal sex determination, and a genuine cultural shift in women’s economic participation produced a measurable normalisation of its sex ratio.⁴² It is the evidence that this is reversible.

The burnt girl in Karachi was the inheritor of her foremother’s legacy of being burnt for being women- whether at the stake, or on their dead husbands’ pyres. But something new happened in South Korea. The women who were not eliminated made a decision: They called it the 4B movement: bihon, bichulsan, biyeonae, bisekseu — no marriage, no childbirth, no dating, no sex.⁴³ South Korea’s total fertility rate fell to 0.72 in 2023 — the lowest ever recorded by any country on earth.⁴⁴ The UN projects its population of 51 million will halve by the end of this century.⁴⁵ The government has spent over $200 billion in sixteen years on pro-natalist policies — childcare subsidies, mortgages for newlywed couples, extended parental leave.⁴⁶ ⁴⁷ The women are not interested.

Sources

Tag: Female Foeticide

An acceptable genocide

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