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Hint of foeticide being imported from India by GS Mudur
-The Telegraph

Indian women living in Canada are more likely to have male babies during their second or third deliveries, according to a new study that hints Indians may have carried the malaise of female foeticide to Canada.

Researchers in Canada have found that the male-female ratio of babies born to women from India who already have children is significantly higher than the ratio observed among women from other countries, including Pakistan.

Their analysis of births in Ontario, Canada’s most populous and ethnically diverse province, has shown that the male-female ratio of infants was 1.04 among women from India who had no previous children. But this ratio rose to 1.11 among women with one child, and climbed to 1.36 — or 136 boys for every 100 girls — in women who had two children.

The results are published today in the Canadian Medical Association Journal.

“Our findings raise the possibility that couples from India may be more likely than Canadian-born couples to use prenatal sex determination and terminate a second or subsequent pregnancy if the foetus is female,” Joel Ray, assistant professor of medicine at the University of Toronto, and his colleagues wrote in their paper.

The male-female ratio of babies born to Canadian-born women was largely constant at 1.05 whether the women had previous children or not. The ratio observed among women from Pakistan changed from 1.04 to 1.09, but always lower than India’s.

Ray and his colleagues analysed more than 766,000 births in Ontario between 2002 and 2007, comparing the sex ratio of infants born to Canadian-born women with the ratios of infants born to women from other countries.

Their findings appear consistent with observations by an independent earlier study in India that suggested that sections of parents whose first child is a girl abort their second child if prenatal testing shows it is a female foetus.

The earlier study, by Prabhat Jha, a public health specialist in Toronto, and his collaborators in India, had shown that declines in girl-to-boy ratios are larger in educated and richer households in India than in illiterate and poor households.

“The new results suggest that when Indians move to Canada, they don’t change their behaviour,” said Faujdar Ram, director of the Indian Institute of Population Sciences, Mumbai, who was a co-author of the earlier study from India.

“It would appear reasonable to assume that the preference for sons observed in many parts of India and responsible for India’s declining sex ratio has also been carried to Canada,” Ram told The Telegraph.

India’s 2011 population census had revealed the lowest female-to-male sex ratio of children up to six years since 1961 — 914 girls for every 1,000 boys, reflecting the country’s failure to curb female foeticide despite laws banning prenatal sex determination or any form of sex selection.

Ray and his co-authors said whether the observed differences in sex ratios were the result of prenatal sex selection could be determined through a direct study of sex selection or pregnancy termination among people from different world regions.

“An analysis of the duration of residence in Canada, access to fertility care, family income, and parental preferences would be of value in describing factors that might influence prenatal sex selection,” they wrote in their paper.