78 lakh boys and 78 lakh girls were aborted in India in 2015!

A paper was published in 2018 which proved that 15.6 million abortions happened in India in the year 2015. I have independently done a basic fact check here using abortion pill sales data, and the number seems to be accurate. The paper also shows that one third of pregnancies in India are aborted.

99% of Indians also have ingested the propaganda that Indians exclusively abort female babies using sex selective abortion. It is as if boys aren't aborted at all. Consider this article - 

India witnesses one of the highest female infanticide incidents in the world: study

The headline says infanticide (killing of an infant), but the article is actually about foeticide. 2 completely separate issues. Foeticide means abortion, killing the unborn foetus. 

For the 'my body my choice feminists' who consider foetuses as non-humans and akin to a tumorous clump of cells, sex selective abortions shouldn't be disgusting at all. After all, the woman is exercising her choice and the foetus isn't even human!

But they do, of course for political and NGO funding reasons. The moral stand to take is to be against all abortions. But i digress, lower female to male sex ratio can indeed pose problems for society and thus needs to be addressed.

That will be shocking to most is when they find out the actual estimates of boys and girls aborted annually. 

Estimating abortion numbers by sex

Assumptions and data

1. It needs to be understood that nature doesn't give equal outcome. Thus the current average of birth sex ratio (BSR) of all countries is 1.0532 male births per female birth. ie. for 10000 live girls born, 10532 boys will be born. We will take this as natural Indian baseline (however Indian BSR might naturally be higher, no studies on it). Source: World bank data for 2017

2. No of live births in 2015 were 25.4448 million. Data from National Family Health Survey 2015-2016 - NFHS4 - (crude birth rate of 19.0 per 1000 population in 2015 and 133.9 Crore population), confirmed with 2012 UNICEF data.

3. Abortions in 2015 were 15.6 million from the paper linked at the top. So total births without any abortions = 15.6+25.445 = 41.045 million.

4. Indian birth sex ratio in 2012-2016 was 1.085 averaged (NFHS 4, Appendix E, 922 girls per 1000 boys).

From the above facts & assumptions, our computation yields that instead of 21.05Mn boys and 19.99Mn girls, 13.24Mn boys & 12.2Mn girls were born in 2015. 

Ie 7.8 million boys and equal number of girls were aborted in 2015. This completely shatters the narrative that feminists want to set.

What does this data say about sex selective abortion

Boys and girls are not being aborted in the natural ratio of 1.05/1.06. So, some sex selection is indeed happening if we take natural Indian BSR to be 1.05/1.06. However, this sex selection can happen consciously or unconsciously. Some couples may be consciously aborting girl child.

Some may be doing it without knowing the sex. Research has shown that chance of girl being born slightly increases with mothers age, fathers age and existing number of children. So older couples who abort because they want no more children might be aborting more girls than boys unconsciously.

It is also possible that Indian BSR is now higher naturally in the range of 1.07/1.08. If this is true, this would then mean that sex selective abortions have become negligible. There are various studies which make this scenario slightly possible.

This 2011 paper "Sex Ratio at Birth and Mortality Rates Are Negatively Related in Humans" concludes that BSR increases as the country develops. It concludes

The correlation among SRB, fertility, GDP and life expectancy suggests that as human populations become more wealthy, the life expectancy increases (r = 0.80, p<0.001), total fertility is reduced (r = −0.75, p<0.001) and more sons are produced (r = 0.52, p<0.001)

This 2018 paper "Is sex ratio at birth an appropriate measure of prenatal sex selection? Findings of a theoretical model and its application to India". It concludes

Perhaps counterintuitively, we show that when the number of children per family is decreasing on average, the SRB bias may still increase despite a decreasing proportion of parents seeking sex-selective intervention. This is because, as we have shown, the impact of each sex selection event on distorting the aggregated SRB varies according to the level of fertility and increases with a reduction of average family size in an exponential relationship. This disproportionality effect is independent of the fertility squeeze effect.

The paper says that reduction in sex selection in a falling fertility scenario will not guarantee that sex ratio at birth improves. Fascinating. The feminists will keep blaming 'misogynist' Indians as the sex ratio will never improve even if sex selection stops.

SUMMING IT UP

Equal number of boys and girls are aborted annually. Those who complain about sex selective abortions should either take an anti abortion stance or make it clear that it is not the aborted babies that that they care about.

Note: Miscarriages have been ignored. Roughly 6-7Mn miscarriages happen annually in India.
Fun Fact: Wife does not need husband's consent to abort baby as per Indian laws

Has alcohol prohibition worked in Gujarat?

Consider this news article dated 5th Feb 2019. "Is prohibition really effective in Gujarat?"
This article starts with

In dry Gujarat, two cases from different parts of the State show how prohibition is a sham.

Then they go on to narrate 2 cases where bootleggers were apprehended with a stash of alcohol to prove this awesome conclusion. There are frequent opinion pieces and articles like the above which rail against the law citing violation of personal freedoms, tax revenue loss, ineffectiveness of prohibition etc. More often that not, these pieces are written by bevdas who love their alcohol.

Qualitatively, the results have been clear for all to see. Most gujaratis will not mind people drinking in their private spaces, however they do not tolerate drunk people on the streets. Such people are looked at with disdain. Street drunkenness has not been normalized because it is indeed rare. That's a major positive, for the law as well for street safety.

But lets look at some data:

Below chart is from Nationwide survey - National Family Health Survey 4 (2015-16)

NFHS4 2015-16: % of men & women who consume alcohol - statewise

At 11% of men, Gujarat ranks in bottom 3 states in terms of % of people who consume alcohol. This is one third the Indian average. The law has absolutely worked. 

It is clear that decently enforced prohibition works (train and bus passengers embarking at Karnavati are checked for alcohol in buses, autos, train stations randomly). It is also apparent that no ban works 100%, and also leaves scope for some corruption and black-marketeering. But those side effects are well worth the actual outcome.

Societal ill effects of alcohol

1. Alcohol use is highly positively related to domestic violence on women. Below chart from NFHS4 is self explanatory. Alcohol is a breaker of families.

2. Alcohol use makes the streets & homes unsafe for women

85% crime against women due to alcoholism: NCRB 

3. Alcohol is the most widely used date rape drug

The recent #metooindia stories throw light on how woke male feminists use alcohol to take advantage of women who have reduced defenses. Studies prove that alcohol is a most potent and widely used date rape drug. 50% of violent crime and sexual assaults involve the use of alcohol.

4. Hindu community more afflicted 

NFHS data also shows us that 32% of Hindu men consume alcohol as opposed to 11% muslim men.

Feminists should be the first ones to demand heavy regulation of alcohol

This is how the american 1st wave feminist movement started. But modern feminists want to play a game of race to the bottom, drinking alcohol and partying with strangers is a mark of high status for them. Freedom to be stupid! Liberalism is a race to the bottom indeed as Indian alcohol consumption increased 38% in last 7 years. Time for people to start shaming drunkards......