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Infanticide and Selective Abortion

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Infanticide and Selective Abortion — a Global Problem

Provenance: logged as a global Problem on the owner’s request (email 2026-08-26, following the DW documentary Girls make a comeback). Status assessment: a serious, long-entrenched problem — not yet a crisis (reasoning below). The hopeful half of the story lives in 260826 Girls Make a Comeback - Women Shortage India China.

What it is

The systematic elimination of girls before or just after birth because families prefer sons. It is the root cause of the “missing women” of Asia: sex-selective abortion, female infanticide, abandonment of girl infants, and (historically in China) sale of newborn girls. The result is a demographic gender imbalance — more men than women — most severe in India and China.

Scale and evidence

  • Amartya Sen (1990): 100+ million women “missing” relative to the number of men in the developing world, overwhelmingly in India and China.
  • Both India and China now have a structural surplus of men; sex ratios at birth were badly skewed for decades (roughly 110+ boys per 100 girls at the worst points).
  • Consequences visible today: millions of men unable to find wives; bride trafficking/buying, cross-border bride markets, and social strain in surplus-male regions.

Drivers

  • Son preference, for economic and cultural reasons: dowry burdens, patrilineal inheritance, sons expected to provide old-age support; daughters seen as a net cost.
  • Coercive population-control policy: China’s one-child policy and India’s forced-sterilisation era turned “too many children” into “too many daughters”, sharpening the incentive to select boys.
  • Weak enforcement of bans: both countries have outlawed sex-selective abortion, but practice persists, especially in poorer rural areas.

Why it is a problem, not (yet) a crisis

Using the problem-vs-crisis framing in Crisis and Problems:

  • It has identifiable, known causes (son preference + coercive policy) and known remedies (education, enforcement of bans, shifting cultural value of daughters) — the hallmark of a problem, not a systemic state where causes and solutions are unclear.
  • The trend is improving, not tipping. National sex ratios have been normalising; younger urban cohorts show healthier ratios; grassroots and policy change (as the DW documentary documents) is gaining ground. A crisis is a dynamic of escalation or collapse; this is a slow, messy, gradual improvement with stubborn rural pockets.
  • It is not (yet) entangled into a cascading multi-system failure. It currently sits inside the polycrisis as a slow demographic distortion rather than an active tipping-point. That is the difference between “serious problem” and “crisis”.

Watch-list triggers that would upgrade this to crisis status:

  • Reversal of the improving sex-ratio trend (e.g. new coercive demographic policy, collapse of enforcement).
  • The surplus-male problem tipping into organised instability (large-scale trafficking, gender-based political radicalisation, conflict).
  • Interaction with other crises — economic collapse, war, displacement — that make daughter-discrimination lethal at scale again.

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