Painting by Numbers: Locating Missing Girls in the Sex Ratio

The Independent recently reported that it had commissioned the analysis of a series of tables showing the gender of second-born children to parents by country of birth. The aim was to find out whether the practice of sex selective abortion has come to Britain through the reproductive habits of ethnic communities in Britain. The findings, generated out of data from the Office for National Statistics (ONS), were that, in two-child families in some first-generation migrant families, there was a higher chance of girls being aborted when the first child was a daughter. Unsurprisingly, however, the findings were mixed and at best elusive and inconclusive, despite the headline “Shock figures call into question official assurances that gender ratio for British births is ‘normal’.”

• https://archive.discoversociety.org/2014...