Social Impact of Sex Ratio, Female Foeticide and Infanticide

Social Impact of Sex Ratio, Female Foeticide and Infanticide

The sex ratio measures how many males exist for every unit of females in a population, and in India this ratio has been moving in the wrong direction for the child population specifically — from 927 to 919 females per 1000 males over a single decade. That is not a natural biological drift; it is the cumulative statistical footprint of gender discrimination playing out at scale.

Two distinct practices drive this imbalance, and it is worth keeping them separate: female foeticide is the abortion of a female foetus while still in the womb (usually after its sex has been learned through a misused prenatal test), while female infanticide is the killing of a female child after she has already been born. Both stem from the same underlying preference for sons, and both actively worsen the sex ratio. …