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
Fun Fact: Wife does not need husband's consent to abort baby as per Indian laws
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