Sex imbalances and son preference

This study aims to examine the trends in social and geographical variations in SRB in Korea. .The data was taken from “Vital Statistics Birth” for the period from 1981 to 2005. We computed the annual male proportion of live births according to mother’s education, mother’s occupation and geography, demonstrating three year moving average. Logistic regression analysis was employed to estimate the odds ratios of male birth according to social and residential groups. SRB in Korea was more prominent in higher social groups and Seoul dwellers until the early 1980’s, but the ratio reversed to be higher in the less educated, manual-job, and country-living mothers since the late 1980’s. The socioeconomic and geographical gap in SRB was most notable in the early 1990s when the SRB in the country was at its peak, and from the late 1990s onwards, the gap has since narrowed. This unique South Korean phenomenon of a social and geographical reversal pattern in SRB supports the diffusion theory of people adopting medical technology for sex selective abortion, suggesting a model to predict the future trends in countries exhibiting an imbalance in SRB.

Previous studies of China’s exceptionally high sex ratio at birth have emphasized the prevailing national and regional fertility policy as well as the gendered composition of children ever born. Little attention, meanwhile, has been paid to the effect of fertility intentions of the sex of next birth for a household. In the paper, we use the data from China’s 2001 national family planning and reproductive health and hierarchical models to study how macro factors (mainly fertility policy) and micro factors (mainly fertility intention and children composition) affect the sex of next birth. We find that fertility policy exerts a significant effect on the sex of next, but this effect is intertwined by children composition. For those having had a son (or sons), the policy exerts no effect, but for those with only daughters, the effect is quite significant. Crucially, however, fertility intention as independent from fertility policy has a significant effect on the sex of next birth.

Abortion was legalised in Nepal in 2002 and the government began providing comprehensive abortion care services in 2004. Prior to that, the sex ratio at birth remained within normal limits, though other indicators suggested high levels of son preference. Changes in the sex ratio at birth since 2004 may indicate the extent to which sex selection has resulted from the introduction of abortion services.
Birth-order specific conditional sex ratios (CSRs) were calculated using data from four Nepal Demographic and Health Survey (NDHS). CSRs were looked at over time as well as for different sub-groups in order to assess trends and see which women were most likely to have sex selective abortions.
During 2007-10 the CSR for second-order births where the first born was a girl was just 742 (girls per 1,000 boys). Before abortion was legalised the same CSR was 1021. The CSR was lowest amongst educated women and richer women, especially in urban areas.
The fall in CSRs witnessed post legalisation indicates that sex-selective abortion is increasing. This change is likely driven by both supply and demand factors. Falling fertility has intensified the need to bear a son sooner, while legal abortion services have reduced the costs and risks associated with obtaining an abortion.

China has one of the most skewed sex ratio at birth (SRB) in the world. However, while the SRB in Hong Kong (HK) has historically been much lower (~106), it has recently seen a dramatic increase.

We use a very large, detailed data-set (N 850,331) of all recorded births in HK between 1995 and 2009 to calculate new SRBs for the territory both by parity and, by virtue of the large sample size, by a much more detailed set of immigrant partnership variables.

At parity one, the SRBs of both HK born couples and other immigrants are broadly similar. At parity two, the SRB of HK born parents is 107.8. Among recent arrived immigrants from Mainland China, this rises to 127.1. At parities three and four, the HK born SRBs rise to 110.6 and 116.6, while the recently arrived Mainland Chinese SRB is 216.0 and 264.3.

HK has been serving as an outlet for 'elite Mainland couples' able to afford the costs of giving birth there to circumvent the both anti-prenatal sex selection legislation and family planning regulations to achieve the desired effect: a male offspring.

In this paper we use the concepts of Behavioral Intention (a person’s relative degree of intention to perform a given behavior) and the Theory of Reasoned Action (TRA) (behavioral intention can be predicted by the individual’s attitude and subjective norms of other people’s attitude) to develop a model of fetal sex selection in rural China. Using the TRA model and primary data collected from surveys conducted in three counties of SX Province, we analyzed the impact of subjective norms on an individual’s behavioral intention to select the sex of their fetus. Results suggest that, whether or not to select the sex of one’s fetus during pregnancy is determined primarily by the individual’s attitudes toward the relative worth of having a male or female child (son preference). In this model, the subjective norms of groups in an individual’s social ties structure strongly affect the individual’s intention to sex-select. Different types of social ties correlate differently with the intention to sex-select indicating that the choice to sex-select during pregnancy is an outcome of a tension between blood ties and marital ties, strong ties and weak ties.