Girls go missing in India |
Families are steadily getting smaller in India but in many homes the missing children are girls.Around seven million girls go missing in India every decade, with the fall in sex ratio corresponding with rising affluence, increasing availability of sex-determination technology and declining family size. The natural sex ratio at birth favours boys, with about 1,020 boys born to 1,000 girls. This bias in favour of boys is nature`s way of balancing the slightly raised risk of death in baby boys, which even outs the overall sex ratio by the age of six. Yet not only are fewer girls born because of sex-selective abortions but more girls are also dying in the first five years of birth because of neglect.More boys are born than girls, but the ratio evens out by age 6 as boys are biologically more likely to die of illness in early infancy.
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