“Sex-selective abortion—the infamous practice of aborting fetuses, usually girls, because of their sex—has become much less common in recent years,” notes The Doomslayer.
The Economist explains:
Without fanfare, something remarkable has happened. The noxious practice of aborting girls simply for being girls has become dramatically less common. It first became widespread in the late 1980s, as cheap ultrasound machines made it easy to determine the sex of a fetus. Parents who were desperate for a boy but did not want a large family—or, in China, were not allowed one—started routinely terminating females. Globally, among babies born in 2000, a staggering 1.6 million girls were missing from the number you would expect, given the natural sex ratio at birth. This year that number is likely to be 200,000—and it is still falling.
The fading of boy preference in regions where it was strongest has been astonishingly rapid. The natural ratio is about 105 boy babies for every 100 girls; because boys are slightly more likely to die young, this leads to rough parity at reproductive age. The sex ratio at birth, once wildly skewed across Asia, has become more even. In China it fell from a peak of 117.8 boys per 100 girls in 2006 to 109.8 last year, and in India from 109.6 in 2010 to 106.8. In South Korea it is now completely back to normal, having been a shocking 115.7 in 1990.
Abortions have fallen from 13.5 million per year to 9.5 million per year in China, between 1990 and the present.
But China’s birth rate has not risen, and remains well below replacement. There were only about 9 million live births in China in 2023, compared to 24 million births in 1990. Some Chinese hospitals have closed their maternity wards as birth rates have collapsed. China’s birth rate fell from 6.77 births per 1,000 people in 2022 to a record low of 6.39 births per 1,000 people in 2023.
