Has the ‘global war against baby girls’ come to America?

In a 2011 study titled “The Global War Against Baby Girls,” one of us (Nicholas Eberstadt) presented troubling evidence that new and biologically unnatural imbalances in sex ratios at birth were emerging in Eastern Asia, Southeastern Asia, South Asia, Western Asia, and elsewhere. In one country after another, demographic data were registering a surfeit of male infants—excesses far above what would have been expected from the universal norm of roughly 103-105 baby boys for every 100 baby girls observed in large human populations throughout history. These ominous new trends, we theorized, were explained by mass female feticide: a phenomenon driven by the collision of ruthless parental son preference, low fertility levels (whereby the gender outcome of each birth took on added import for parents), and the advent of widespread and inexpensive prenatal gender determination technology in the context of easily available or unconditional abortion. 

We noted that rising levels of income and educational attainment did not preclude abnormally high sex ratios at birth (or SRBs)—to the contrary, in some countries SRBs seemed to be rising along with national affluence. And we warned there was no reason to think this disturbing practice could not come to Western countries: rather, initial research on the situation in the U.S. and the UK at the time of that report suggested the possibility that sex-selective abortion may be common to other subpopulations in developed or less developed societies, even if these do not affect the overall SRB for each country as a whole.

As we begin the 2020s, this may be a good time to revisit the issue of unnatural SRBs and the question of whether America has become a battlefield in “the global war against baby girls.” Such an inquiry is all the more timely thanks to revisions in U.S. official vital statistics protocols, which now offer more detailed natality data than were available for the aforementioned study.