Asian Parents in America Still Prefer Sons
A recent study that examined the results of the 2000 Census showed that the likelihood of Chinese, Korean and Asian Indian parents giving birth to a son increases after the family already has one or two girls.
In many Asian cultures, giving birth to a son is very important. Co-authors Douglas Almond of Columbia University, and Lena Edlund of the National Bureau of Economic Research in Cambridge, Mass., sought to document the male-biased sex rations among U.S.-born children of Asian families.
They found evidence suggesting “that in a sub-population with a traditional son preference, the technologies are being used to generate male births when preceding births are female."
The discovery of sex-selection seems to be a new one, because researchers were unable to find the same variance in the 1990 census, Almond and Edlund said.
"Between 1989 and 1999, prenatal ultrasound use among non-Japanese Asian mothers rose from around 38 percent to 64 percent of pregnancies," they said, citing data from the U.S. National Center for Health Statistics.
It is for this reason that researchers were able to point to the use of fetal ultrasound to determine the sex of the baby followed by disproportionate abortion of females.
Among Asian parents, the normal birth ration is 1.05 boys to 1 girl for the first child. However, if the first child is a girl, the odds of having a boy next jumps to 1.17-to-1, and after that, the likelihood rises to 1.51-to-1.
The study’s co-authors sought to determine if these ratios were the same in Asia. One explanation for high sex ratios in Asia is the one-child policy in China.
"For India, it is often claimed that dowries are necessary to marry off a daughter, while sons are money spinners who can get both a dowry and support the parents in old age," they said.
Carl Haub, a population researcher at the private Population Reference Bureau, said Indians also tend to have a higher son preference.
"If you are a Hindu it is of great value to have a son officiate at your cremation," explained Haub.
Phil Morgan of the Center for Social Demography and Ethnography at Duke University, said Almond and Edlund’s findings were true to form.
"We see this pattern strongly in places like South Korea. Why would it not show up here? I think that it is unlikely to persist in subsequent generations," said Morgan.
The study was published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences on Tuesday. Research was funded by the Institute for Social and Economic Policy Research at Columbia University.
—
On the Net: