Across continents, cultures, and centuries, prospective parents have always preferred boys to girls.  Nature agrees because the ratio of live births is usually 105 boys to every 100 girls, because boys have higher rates of infant mortality, engage in high-risk behavior and die sooner.  By age 30 there are equal numbers of males and females in the United States; and after age 30, there are more females.

Not so in countries like China and India, where decades of sex-selected abortions and infanticides have left a shortfall of about 160 million women—almost the entire female population of the United States.  Reverberations of this decades-long “gendercide,” as it has become known, are only beginning to be felt by these countries—and they will eventually be felt by us.

The conquences of 140 boys for every 100 girls is going to cause profound changes in culture that no one can even predict.  Women are undervalued at birth and overvalued in marriage. Can this global gender imbalance be rectified?  No one knows for sure.