India: Son Preference

University Of British Columbia Economist Kevin Milligan Dept: The problem isn t academic, and it isn t going away. Sex selection is practised in both India and China, two of Canada s biggest sources of immigrants. Cheap and portable ultrasound technology is now available everywhere. In Punjab, one of the most prosperous areas of India, the ratio of baby boys to baby girls has reached 120 to 100. A normal birth ratio is 103 to 107, which is nature s way of compensating for the fact that boys mortality is higher, according to Globe and Mail. In Canada, of course, gender-based abortion is completely legal. University of British Columbia economist Kevin Milligan, working with Douglas Almond and Lena Edlund of Columbia University, used census data to determine its patterns among immigrant groups. They published their findings in a 2009 paper, Son Preference and the Persistence of Culture. Although they didn t try to put numbers to their findings, the data clearly show that sex selection is culturally specific and persists into the second generation and overblown or not, Canadians are obviously uneasy about sex-selective abortion. According to a recent Angus Reid poll, 66 per cent of women think there should be laws governing whether a women can abort a fetus solely because of gender. It s unlikely that more education and development will be the answer because, in India, sex selection is more popular among the affluent. Gendercide is also on the rise in China, where the ratio of boys to girls increased to 119 by 2004. In some regions, it s more than 150. Leading demographer Nicholas Eberstadt calls the rising tide of sex selection a global war against baby girls. (www.immigrantscanada.com). As reported in the news.