The Stunning Decline of the Preference for Having Boys

Millions of girls were aborted for being girls. Now parents often lean towards them.

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Without fanfare, something remarkable has happened. The noxious practice of aborting girls simply for being girls has become dramatically less common. It first became widespread in the late 1980s, as cheap ultrasound machines made it easy to determine the sex of a fetus. Parents who were desperate for a boy but did not want a large family—or, in China, were not allowed one—started routinely terminating females.

Globally, among babies born in 2000, a staggering 1.6 million girls were missing from the number you would expect, given the natural sex ratio at birth. In 2025, that number is likely to be 200,000—and it is still falling.

The fading of boy preference in regions where it was strongest has been astonishingly rapid. The natural ratio is about 105 boy babies for every 100 girls; because boys are slightly more likely to die young, this leads to rough parity at reproductive age. The sex ratio at birth, once wildly skewed across Asia, has become more even.

In China, it fell from a peak of 117.8 boys per 100 girls in 2006 to 109.8 in 2024, and in India from 109.6 in 2010 to 106.8. In South Korea it is now completely back to normal, having been a shocking 115.7 in 1990.

In 2010 an Economist cover called the mass abortion of girls "gendercide." The global decline of this scourge is a blessing. First, it implies an ebbing of the traditions that underpinned it: The stark belief that men matter more and the expectation in some cultures that a daughter will grow up to serve her husband's family, so parents need a son to look after them in old age. Such sexist ideas have not vanished, but evidence that they are fading is welcome.