World Trouble Spots

There are many ways to kill baby girls. Feeding them poisonous oleander berries, smothering them in their afterbirth or just not feeding them are among the ancient methods still in use in some rural parts of Asia, where baby boys have always been preferred. Nowadays technology also plays a role: fetal testing procedures, such as amniocentesis and sonograms, are employed by women in China, Korea, India and elsewhere to detect the sex of a fetus. Many mothers will abort a female. "Over the past century science has only quickened the pace of the death of the female child, from the born to the unborn stage," says Meenu Sondhi, an amniocentesis researcher at Delhi University.

Those permitted to be born may not survive into adulthood because of deliberate neglect. Studies show that female children in India and Bangladesh are breast-fed for a shorter period and given less nourishing meals than males. In rural China when food is scarce, anthropologists report, girls are more likely to suffer from chronic malnutrition than their brothers.

The demographic impact is dramatic: in South Korea, where fetal testing to determine sex is common, male births exceed female births by 14%, in contrast to a worldwide average of 5%. In Guangdong province, the China news agency Xinhua reported, 500,000 bachelors are approaching middle age without hopes of marrying, because they outnumber women ages 30 to 45 by more than 10 to 1. Alarmed by such imbalances, some governments have taken steps to limit the use of amniocentesis as a prelude to female feticide. Asian nations also hoped to influence parents by designating 1990 the Year of the Girl Child.