temujin
FULL MEMBER
- Joined
- Jul 29, 2010
- Messages
- 447
- Reaction score
- 0
The lost girls: Thousands of ‘missing’ girls revealed by analysis of UK’s 2011 census results
The natural ratio of boys to girls at birth is 1.05, meaning that there are about 105 boys born for every 100 girls – the small balance in favour of boys is seen as nature’s way of counteracting the slightly higher mortality of boys in early life.
When the sex ratio begins to exceed 1.08 – more than 108 boys for every 100 girls – then statisticians believe that some other factor must be at play, such as the selective abortion of female foetuses so that women can become quickly pregnant again with a boy. In some parts of India and China, sex ratios are as high as 1.2 or 1.4 are believed to be caused by widespread sex-selective abortions.
The Independent commissioned data from the Office for National Statistics (ONS) to see whether sex-selective abortions could be affecting sex ratios within families living in Britain. We used the data to test whether having a daughter as a first child raises the probability of a family’s second-born child being a boy.
All things being equal, the gender of the second child should not be affected significantly by the gender of the first born. However, we found that the sex ratio of second-born children was heavily boy-biased in the families of mothers born in Pakistan and Afghanistan, and that there was some evidence of this being the case in families of mothers born in Bangladesh.
Specifically, we found sex ratios of between about 1.1 and 1.2 for the second child of these families – a heavy bias in favour of boys that could not be explained if the parents were completely “blind” to the sex of their offspring. Overall, the total number of “missing girls” in these families is conservatively estimated to be between 1,400 and 4,700 individuals if you also include sex ratio anomalies for parents born in Nepal and India.
There are two possible explanations for these missing girls and the sex-ratio anomalies seen in two-child families. The first is that it is a statistical feature of the fact that some families with two daughters quickly try for a third child in the hope that it will be son.
This behaviour means that these families quickly move from the two-child category to three-child category, making the two-child category they leave behind more heavily biased toward boys. The idea of “don’t stop until you have a boy” is not as fanciful as it may appear – it was common among the English aristocracy when having a male heir was so important for primogeniture.
The second possibility is gender-selective abortions, notably women aborting female foetuses in the hope of getting pregnant again with a boy. This may well take preference over the “don’t stop” strategy in an age when controlling the overall size of your family is just as important as controlling its gender make-up.
Statisticians from Imperial College tested both scenarios on the data supplied to The Independent by the ONS. They found that the “don’t stop until you get a boy” could in fact explain much of the sex-ratio anomalies seen in the two-child families of parents born in India, China, Nepal and the rest of East Asia.
However it could not explain all of the anomalies seen in the families of mothers born in Pakistan and Afghanistan – and possibly Bangladesh. Put simply, our analysis indicates that gender-selective abortions must be taking place in these communities.
The next question is how much of the gender imbalance in the other ethnic groups (India, China etc) is due to selective abortions? The “don’t stop” behaviour and gender selective abortion are not mutually exclusive, and given that we have found significant evidence of sex-selective abortion among some ethnic groups, it seems reasonable to suppose that it may also play a role in the families of parents born in other countries for which we have weaker statistical evidence.
In total, the statistics suggest that the selective abortion of female foetuses is taking place on a big enough scale to account for between 1,400 and 4,700 “missing girls” within all these ethnic groups (Pakistani, Afghan, Bangladeshi, Indian, Chinese, Nepalese and the others) living in England and Wales.
Being more precise about sex-selective abortions would require a more extensive analysis of census data, combined with birth statistics and possibly the gender of surgically aborted foetuses where this is possible. In any event, it is simply not credible to claim, as Government ministers have done repeatedly, that there is no evidence to suggest that sex-selective abortions take place in Britain.
The lost girls: Thousands of ‘missing’ girls revealed by analysis of UK’s 2011 census results - Science - News - The Independent
The lost girls: It seems that the global war on girls has arrived in Britain
The selective abortion of female foetuses is almost routine in many parts of the world where it has contributed to significant shifts from the natural 50:50 sex ratio in favour of boys. In some parts of India and China, for instance, there are now almost one-and-a-half times as many boys as there are girls.
Demographic experts and economists have long warned about the "global war on girls" but many politicians in Britain - and other western nations - had believed it to be a foreign phenomenon that did not affect the gender make-up of the UK population.
Only last May, the Department of Health published its own study into the sex ratio of children born in Britain to foreign-born mothers. It came to the reassuring conclusion that there was little or no evidence that sex-selective abortions were taking place to any significant extent in this country.
"The UK gender ratio is 105.1 male births to 100 females and is well within the normal boundaries of populations. When broken down by the mothers' country of birth, no group is statistically different from the range that we would expect to see naturally occurring," its report concluded.
Earl Howe, the minister responsible for overseeing the health department's investigation, was even more unequivocal. In answer to a Parliamentary question in June, Earl Howe said: "We do not believe that there is any evidence that this is happening in the UK."
However, the health department did not carry out a powerful enough statistical analysis to uncover any significant gender inconsistencies due to sex-selective abortions. Specifically, the department's Analytical Team did not look at the birth ratios of second or third-born children of immigrant mothers or fathers.
Experts in this area say that if you are looking for selective abortions based on gender, the way to do it is to look at whether having an older daughter is likely to affect the sex of a younger child. In other words, do you see more boys than expected among the younger siblings of older daughters? This is very unlikely without the selective abortion of female foetuses.
Studies in Canada and the United States have shown that parents from certain immigrant backgrounds are more likely to have a boy as their second child if their first born is a girl, compared to families where the first child is a boy. This boy-bias was even more pronounced among the third born of three-child families where the two eldest are girls.
The Canadian study, based on the country's national census data, also showed that the problem was not isolated to first-generation immigrants. In fact, second generation parents born in Canada were more likely to use sex-selective abortions to ensure that a second or third child was a boy, the study concluded.
The normal sex ratio at birth is 1.05, meaning that there are about 105 baby boys born to every 100 baby girls. This natural bias in favour of boys is believed to counteract the slightly higher risk of premature death in boys compared to girls. But if the sex ratio begins to rise above 1.08,statisticians believe something else must be influencing the appearance of the extra boys.
Some people have argued, for instance, that certain ethnic groups are just more likely to give birth to baby boys than other ethnic groups. However, there is no firm evidence to suggest that the natural 1.05 sex ratio at birth varies between ethnic groups around the world.
Nevertheless, there is convincing data to show that sex ratios have been artificially manipulated to an extraordinary degree within certain cultures in some parts of the world. In many cases, this is primarily due to widely-available abortions and the widespread use of gender testing, such as ultrasound scanning after the first trimester (12 weeks) of pregnancy, which can determine the sex of a foetus with an accuracy of 99 per cent or more.
In parts of India, notably the relatively affluent north-west states of Punjab and Haryana, the sex ratio of certain age groups is now about 1.2 or above - meaning there are 120 boys for every 100 girls. While in some parts of China, especially those where the Han Chinese form the main ethnic group, sex ratios among children have reached as high as 1.4 or even 1.5 - one-and-a half times as many boys as girls.
In both these regions of the world, the vilification of girls is deeply engrained within some elements of the population. A Punjabi proverb, for instance, likens raising a daughter to watering your neighbour's garden, while an old Chinese saying states that it is better to have one crippled son than eight healthy daughters.
The greater value placed on a son in many parts of the world often has deep cultural roots. In the case of India, it likely involves the dowry system - girls are just more expensive - while in China, which has practised a "one-child policy", it may concern fears of being unsupported in old age, or of the family "line" dying out, which is anathema to the Confucian idea of cultural heritage.
However, being unhappy with having daughters is evidently not shared by similar cultural or religious traditions. Japan, another Confucian culture, has a normal sex ratio at birth, as does the largely-Hindu state of Kerala in south-west India, where women also enjoy one of the highest literacy rates in the country (and where property can be inherited through the maternal line).
A 2006 study by Indian scientists, published in The Lancet, estimated that during the previous two decades about 10 million female foetuses had been aborted in India following ultrasound scans to determine the sex of an unborn baby - ultrasound machines have been used in almost every maternity clinic in India since 1990.
Abortions based on sex-selection are, however, just the latest manifestation of the war on girls, leading at its most heinous to the deliberate abandonment or infanticide of female babies. As recently as 2003, a study in the British Medical Journal found that girls in India were nearly twice as likely as boys to die in the first year of life.
More recently, the Council of Europe has warned that sex-selective abortions appear to be responsible for worrying changes in the sex ratio of boys to girls in Albania, Armenia, Azerbaijan and Georgia. It has warned that gender imbalances "are like to create difficulties for men to find spouses, lead to serious human rights violations such as forced prostitution, trafficking for the purpose of marriage or sexual exploitation, and contribute to a rise in criminality and social unrest".
Imbalances in the sex ratio of some parts of the world, notably South Asia, West Asia and North Africa, are nothing new and predate the use of ultrasound machines. In 1990, it led Amartya Sen, the Indian-born Nobel economist, to calculate that some 100 million women had already gone missing in the world - a figure that must have easily doubled since then, aided by gender-selective abortion.
"These numbers tell us, quietly, a terrible story of inequality and neglect leading to the excess mortality of women," Sen wrote in a seminal essay on the disappearing sex published nearly a quarter of a century ago.
"If this situation is to be corrected by political action and public policy, the reasons why there are so many 'missing' women must first be understood. We confront here what is clearly one of the more momentous, and neglected, problems facing the world today."
Since Sen wrote this warning nearly three decades ago, the problem of the world's missing women has continued to be neglected. Now, the global war on girls can truly be said to have arrived in Britain.
The lost girls: It seems that the global war on girls has arrived in Britain - Science - News - The Independent
This was being discussed on the Nihal show on the BBC Asian network this am and it was shocking how prevalent gender selective abortions are among Asians in the UK. More importantly, the findings illustrate that this practice is not an exclusively Indian phenomenon as some Pakistan would have us believe but is in fact rampant across Asia and beyond. The DOH have apparently taken note of the latest findings and is planning to act on them but they would have to make abortions on spurious grounds a criminal offense to really clamp down on this abhorrent 'tradition'...
The natural ratio of boys to girls at birth is 1.05, meaning that there are about 105 boys born for every 100 girls – the small balance in favour of boys is seen as nature’s way of counteracting the slightly higher mortality of boys in early life.
When the sex ratio begins to exceed 1.08 – more than 108 boys for every 100 girls – then statisticians believe that some other factor must be at play, such as the selective abortion of female foetuses so that women can become quickly pregnant again with a boy. In some parts of India and China, sex ratios are as high as 1.2 or 1.4 are believed to be caused by widespread sex-selective abortions.
The Independent commissioned data from the Office for National Statistics (ONS) to see whether sex-selective abortions could be affecting sex ratios within families living in Britain. We used the data to test whether having a daughter as a first child raises the probability of a family’s second-born child being a boy.
All things being equal, the gender of the second child should not be affected significantly by the gender of the first born. However, we found that the sex ratio of second-born children was heavily boy-biased in the families of mothers born in Pakistan and Afghanistan, and that there was some evidence of this being the case in families of mothers born in Bangladesh.
Specifically, we found sex ratios of between about 1.1 and 1.2 for the second child of these families – a heavy bias in favour of boys that could not be explained if the parents were completely “blind” to the sex of their offspring. Overall, the total number of “missing girls” in these families is conservatively estimated to be between 1,400 and 4,700 individuals if you also include sex ratio anomalies for parents born in Nepal and India.
There are two possible explanations for these missing girls and the sex-ratio anomalies seen in two-child families. The first is that it is a statistical feature of the fact that some families with two daughters quickly try for a third child in the hope that it will be son.
This behaviour means that these families quickly move from the two-child category to three-child category, making the two-child category they leave behind more heavily biased toward boys. The idea of “don’t stop until you have a boy” is not as fanciful as it may appear – it was common among the English aristocracy when having a male heir was so important for primogeniture.
The second possibility is gender-selective abortions, notably women aborting female foetuses in the hope of getting pregnant again with a boy. This may well take preference over the “don’t stop” strategy in an age when controlling the overall size of your family is just as important as controlling its gender make-up.
Statisticians from Imperial College tested both scenarios on the data supplied to The Independent by the ONS. They found that the “don’t stop until you get a boy” could in fact explain much of the sex-ratio anomalies seen in the two-child families of parents born in India, China, Nepal and the rest of East Asia.
However it could not explain all of the anomalies seen in the families of mothers born in Pakistan and Afghanistan – and possibly Bangladesh. Put simply, our analysis indicates that gender-selective abortions must be taking place in these communities.
The next question is how much of the gender imbalance in the other ethnic groups (India, China etc) is due to selective abortions? The “don’t stop” behaviour and gender selective abortion are not mutually exclusive, and given that we have found significant evidence of sex-selective abortion among some ethnic groups, it seems reasonable to suppose that it may also play a role in the families of parents born in other countries for which we have weaker statistical evidence.
In total, the statistics suggest that the selective abortion of female foetuses is taking place on a big enough scale to account for between 1,400 and 4,700 “missing girls” within all these ethnic groups (Pakistani, Afghan, Bangladeshi, Indian, Chinese, Nepalese and the others) living in England and Wales.
Being more precise about sex-selective abortions would require a more extensive analysis of census data, combined with birth statistics and possibly the gender of surgically aborted foetuses where this is possible. In any event, it is simply not credible to claim, as Government ministers have done repeatedly, that there is no evidence to suggest that sex-selective abortions take place in Britain.
The lost girls: Thousands of ‘missing’ girls revealed by analysis of UK’s 2011 census results - Science - News - The Independent
The lost girls: It seems that the global war on girls has arrived in Britain
The selective abortion of female foetuses is almost routine in many parts of the world where it has contributed to significant shifts from the natural 50:50 sex ratio in favour of boys. In some parts of India and China, for instance, there are now almost one-and-a-half times as many boys as there are girls.
Demographic experts and economists have long warned about the "global war on girls" but many politicians in Britain - and other western nations - had believed it to be a foreign phenomenon that did not affect the gender make-up of the UK population.
Only last May, the Department of Health published its own study into the sex ratio of children born in Britain to foreign-born mothers. It came to the reassuring conclusion that there was little or no evidence that sex-selective abortions were taking place to any significant extent in this country.
"The UK gender ratio is 105.1 male births to 100 females and is well within the normal boundaries of populations. When broken down by the mothers' country of birth, no group is statistically different from the range that we would expect to see naturally occurring," its report concluded.
Earl Howe, the minister responsible for overseeing the health department's investigation, was even more unequivocal. In answer to a Parliamentary question in June, Earl Howe said: "We do not believe that there is any evidence that this is happening in the UK."
However, the health department did not carry out a powerful enough statistical analysis to uncover any significant gender inconsistencies due to sex-selective abortions. Specifically, the department's Analytical Team did not look at the birth ratios of second or third-born children of immigrant mothers or fathers.
Experts in this area say that if you are looking for selective abortions based on gender, the way to do it is to look at whether having an older daughter is likely to affect the sex of a younger child. In other words, do you see more boys than expected among the younger siblings of older daughters? This is very unlikely without the selective abortion of female foetuses.
Studies in Canada and the United States have shown that parents from certain immigrant backgrounds are more likely to have a boy as their second child if their first born is a girl, compared to families where the first child is a boy. This boy-bias was even more pronounced among the third born of three-child families where the two eldest are girls.
The Canadian study, based on the country's national census data, also showed that the problem was not isolated to first-generation immigrants. In fact, second generation parents born in Canada were more likely to use sex-selective abortions to ensure that a second or third child was a boy, the study concluded.
The normal sex ratio at birth is 1.05, meaning that there are about 105 baby boys born to every 100 baby girls. This natural bias in favour of boys is believed to counteract the slightly higher risk of premature death in boys compared to girls. But if the sex ratio begins to rise above 1.08,statisticians believe something else must be influencing the appearance of the extra boys.
Some people have argued, for instance, that certain ethnic groups are just more likely to give birth to baby boys than other ethnic groups. However, there is no firm evidence to suggest that the natural 1.05 sex ratio at birth varies between ethnic groups around the world.
Nevertheless, there is convincing data to show that sex ratios have been artificially manipulated to an extraordinary degree within certain cultures in some parts of the world. In many cases, this is primarily due to widely-available abortions and the widespread use of gender testing, such as ultrasound scanning after the first trimester (12 weeks) of pregnancy, which can determine the sex of a foetus with an accuracy of 99 per cent or more.
In parts of India, notably the relatively affluent north-west states of Punjab and Haryana, the sex ratio of certain age groups is now about 1.2 or above - meaning there are 120 boys for every 100 girls. While in some parts of China, especially those where the Han Chinese form the main ethnic group, sex ratios among children have reached as high as 1.4 or even 1.5 - one-and-a half times as many boys as girls.
In both these regions of the world, the vilification of girls is deeply engrained within some elements of the population. A Punjabi proverb, for instance, likens raising a daughter to watering your neighbour's garden, while an old Chinese saying states that it is better to have one crippled son than eight healthy daughters.
The greater value placed on a son in many parts of the world often has deep cultural roots. In the case of India, it likely involves the dowry system - girls are just more expensive - while in China, which has practised a "one-child policy", it may concern fears of being unsupported in old age, or of the family "line" dying out, which is anathema to the Confucian idea of cultural heritage.
However, being unhappy with having daughters is evidently not shared by similar cultural or religious traditions. Japan, another Confucian culture, has a normal sex ratio at birth, as does the largely-Hindu state of Kerala in south-west India, where women also enjoy one of the highest literacy rates in the country (and where property can be inherited through the maternal line).
A 2006 study by Indian scientists, published in The Lancet, estimated that during the previous two decades about 10 million female foetuses had been aborted in India following ultrasound scans to determine the sex of an unborn baby - ultrasound machines have been used in almost every maternity clinic in India since 1990.
Abortions based on sex-selection are, however, just the latest manifestation of the war on girls, leading at its most heinous to the deliberate abandonment or infanticide of female babies. As recently as 2003, a study in the British Medical Journal found that girls in India were nearly twice as likely as boys to die in the first year of life.
More recently, the Council of Europe has warned that sex-selective abortions appear to be responsible for worrying changes in the sex ratio of boys to girls in Albania, Armenia, Azerbaijan and Georgia. It has warned that gender imbalances "are like to create difficulties for men to find spouses, lead to serious human rights violations such as forced prostitution, trafficking for the purpose of marriage or sexual exploitation, and contribute to a rise in criminality and social unrest".
Imbalances in the sex ratio of some parts of the world, notably South Asia, West Asia and North Africa, are nothing new and predate the use of ultrasound machines. In 1990, it led Amartya Sen, the Indian-born Nobel economist, to calculate that some 100 million women had already gone missing in the world - a figure that must have easily doubled since then, aided by gender-selective abortion.
"These numbers tell us, quietly, a terrible story of inequality and neglect leading to the excess mortality of women," Sen wrote in a seminal essay on the disappearing sex published nearly a quarter of a century ago.
"If this situation is to be corrected by political action and public policy, the reasons why there are so many 'missing' women must first be understood. We confront here what is clearly one of the more momentous, and neglected, problems facing the world today."
Since Sen wrote this warning nearly three decades ago, the problem of the world's missing women has continued to be neglected. Now, the global war on girls can truly be said to have arrived in Britain.
The lost girls: It seems that the global war on girls has arrived in Britain - Science - News - The Independent
This was being discussed on the Nihal show on the BBC Asian network this am and it was shocking how prevalent gender selective abortions are among Asians in the UK. More importantly, the findings illustrate that this practice is not an exclusively Indian phenomenon as some Pakistan would have us believe but is in fact rampant across Asia and beyond. The DOH have apparently taken note of the latest findings and is planning to act on them but they would have to make abortions on spurious grounds a criminal offense to really clamp down on this abhorrent 'tradition'...
