Social preference for boys leads women in certain Asian countries to practice selective abortions. Familiar in China and India, the phenomenon is growing in Vietnam, where the sex ratio at birth (SRB, or the number of boys born per hundred girls) rose to 112 in 2007, seven points above the "natural" level of 105. That's what demographer Christophe Z. Guilmoto, director of research at the Paris Population and Development Center, has shown in a study published in the online scientific review Plos One.

    Grégoire Allix: Is the rise in the number of boys in Vietnam recent?

    Christophe Z. Guilmoto: The only statistics available up until now dated from the 1999 census, which did not show any anomaly. We had access to more recent data which show a linear and significant increase in the number of boys starting in 2004.

    How do you explain that?

    For years, the Vietnamese government has limited births to two children per family. Boys traditionally play a social and religious role; they represent the line, the clan. That didn't just happen overnight. The change in behavior comes from the widespread use of ultrasound devices throughout the country starting in 2000. Additionally, abortion was already common practice in Vietnam.

    Is the limitation on births responsible for this prenatal selection?

    Previously, people had children until they had a son, then they used contraceptives. Thus, from the 1980's on, we observed that three-quarters of last-born children were boys. But that practice became impossible with the limitation on the number of births, which de facto exerts pressure on selection of the child's sex. In China, where this limitation is more severe than in Vietnam and where sonograms became current from 1982, the SRB has been on the rise since the beginning of the 1980's and reached 120 in 2005, even 130 in the Jiangxi, Anhui and Shaanxi provinces.

    Yet the phenomenon also affects India, where there's no limitation on the number of births ...

    The average SRB in India is 113, with huge regional differences. The north of the country demonstrates a profound aversion towards girls, whose dowries are a burden to their parents. In the Punjab, the SRB was 125 in 2005, without political pressure for birth limitation. Even in the capital, Delhi, it's over 120.

    We also observe elevated SRB's, with no policy of birth control, in Taiwan, Singapore, Pakistan and Bangladesh. Finally, we've discovered an increase in the SRB in the southern Caucuses, Armenia, Georgia and in Azerbaijan, where it grew to 115 in 2000. Sometimes more abortions than births are recorded there! The tendency is the same, at a lower level, in Albania and Montenegro.

    What are the consequences of the preference for boys?

    The real-time consequence is that society as a whole tolerates basic sexual discrimination. Sexism becomes a norm inscribed in social practices.

    Twenty or twenty-five years later, the lack of girls seriously disrupts the matrimonial market in societies where marriage is indispensable. The imbalance brings marriage migration along in its wake. Men who have trouble finding a wife have to go look elsewhere. On the other hand, women are spurred to migrate to the cities and more favored regions, even neighboring countries, where the lack of women gives them a chance of finding a husband from a higher social level.

    Some analysts predict conflicts linked to the lack of women. What do you think?

    I tend to believe that social systems will adapt. Non-marriage, which is still very poorly accepted in Asia, will be recognized as a trajectory of normal life. In India, notably in the Punjab, the dearth of women has also begun to break down caste barriers: men are taking wives from inferior castes, which was totally unthinkable not long ago.

    Is this phenomenon of selective births sustainable?

    Some researchers deem that China, India and the Caucases are showing signs of a reduction in the sex ratio, heralding the end of a cycle, prenatal selection proving ultimately to be a temporary aberration. In South Korea, the sex ratio climbed as in China, before returning to normal in 2007, thanks to the development of its society, which saw women attain education and enter the labor market. But it was thanks, above all, to the action of the government, which reformed family policy and deployed a repressive arsenal against prenatal selection.

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    Translation: Truthout French language editor Leslie Thatcher.

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