Sex Selection and the Missing Daughters

In one line

A statute that does not prohibit abortion and does not prohibit ultrasound: it prohibits telling anybody the sex of a foetus.

In the wording a student can write in an exam: the Pre-conception and Pre-natal Diagnostic Techniques (Prohibition of Sex Selection) Act 1994 regulates the use of prenatal diagnostic techniques and prohibits their use to determine the sex of a foetus. Section 3A prohibits sex selection on a woman or a man or on any tissue, embryo, conceptus, fluid or gametes derived from either. Section 4 permits prenatal diagnostic techniques only for the detection of chromosomal abnormalities, genetic metabolic diseases, haemoglobinopathies, sex-linked genetic diseases, congenital anomalies and such other abnormalities as the Central Supervisory Board specifies, and only where one of the stated conditions is satisfied. Section 5(2) forbids ANY person to communicate the sex of the foetus to the pregnant woman or her relatives or anyone else by words, signs or in any other manner. Section 6 prohibits determination of sex and the causing of sex selection before or after conception. Section 22 prohibits advertisement, and section 23 fixes the penalties. Section 24 raises a presumption that the pregnant woman was COMPELLED by her husband or a relative.

The number

What is measured. The sex ratio at birth, the number of girls born per thousand boys, and the child sex ratio, girls per thousand boys aged nought to six, which the census reports.

What happened. The child sex ratio fell across successive censuses from the 1980s as ultrasound became cheap and widely available, and it fell FURTHEST in several of the most prosperous and best-educated districts of the north and west.

Why that fact is the most important one in this chapter. It refutes the assumption that development produces equality. Income bought the technology; education did not change the preference; and the two together made the practice more efficient rather than less common.

And why the number, not the prosecutions, is the measure. Convictions under the Act are very few. The ratio is the outcome the Act exists to change, and it has improved in recent years on the official series, but state the source and the year of any figure you use and do not invent one.

What causes it

Dowry. A daughter is a cost at marriage and a son is not, which is the connection between this chapter and [Dowry].

Patrilocality. A daughter joins another household at marriage, so investment in her accrues elsewhere.

Inheritance and old age. Property and support pass through sons, which is why the amendment of 2005 to the Hindu Succession Act belongs in this answer, in [Women's Property Rights].

Ritual obligation. The performance of last rites by a son.