The illegal practice of sex-selection abortion is now so prevalent that between 1,400 and 4,700 females have disappeared from the latest national census records of England and Wales, a study suggests.
In many cultures sons are deemed to be more desirable than daughters for religious or economic reasons, meaning couples seek to terminate pregnancies if they find out the child will be female.
Thousands of female foetuses have been killed due to gender-based abortion, a study shows (stock picture)
A government investigation last year found no evidence that women born abroad and now living in the UK were opting to abort females. But an analysis of the 2011 National Census has shown widespread discrepancies in the sex ratio of children in some immigrant families, which suggests girls are being aborted.
Some experts have argued that information on the sex of a child should be withheld from expecting parents until much later in the pregnancy, when abortions are much more difficult to obtain. At present parents can find out their baby’s gender after 13 weeks, and in 2011 around one tenth of the 190,000 abortions performed in England and Wales took place at this stage.
In Britain abortions are legal only where the mother’s physical or mental health would be risked by continuing the pregnancy, or where the child would suffer ‘seriously’ with physical or mental abnormalities if born. This means the Abortion Act 1967 technically bans abortions on the grounds of the baby’s sex alone.
The practice is illegal in many other countries, including those where the practice is widespread. In parts of India and China there are now as many as 120 or 140 boys for every 100 girls despite a ban on gender-based abortion.
Analysis of data showed a trend within immigrant families for ‘accepting’ a female firstborn, but for a disproportionately high number of second babies being male – a phenomenon which would not occur naturally.
Experts suggested this could be two possible reasons for this, which are not mutually exclusive – either the practice of gender-based abortion or the practice of women continuing to have children until a son is born.
At present, parents can find out their baby's gender after 13 weeks of pregnancy (stock picture)
Christoforos Anagnostopoulos, a lecturer in statistics at Imperial College London, said the latter explanation might explain gender imbalances observed in two-child families. But it could not explain sex-ratio anomalies found in families of all sizes, particularly those with mothers from Pakistan, Bangladesh and Afghanistan.
Dr Anagnostopoulos told The Independent: ‘The only readily available explanation that is consistent with a statistically significant gender shift of the sort observed in the census data is gender-selective abortion.
‘In the absence of a better theory, these findings can be interpreted as evidence that gender-selective abortion is taking place.’
It is not known whether sex-selective abortions are being carried out in the mothers’ home countries, or being done illegally in the UK.
A spokeswoman for the Department of Health said: ‘Abortion on the grounds of sex selection is against the law and completely unacceptable.’
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