Between 1970 and 2017, an estimated 23.1 million girls were aborted in China, as parents sought to make sure that the one child they were allowed to have under Chinese law would be a male.
The result is a skewed sex ratio with deep sociological consequences: China has the world’s such ratio at birth with 113.5 boys for every girl that is born.
Recent reports suggest that despite a mainland ban since 2003 on baby gender tests for pregnant mothers, many mothers are sending blood samples to Hong Kong—where such tests are legal—through human mules who smuggle vials of blood through airport customs. These DNA blood tests have led to an influx of pregnant women to Hong Kong, hoping to identify the sex of their baby. However, an illegal trade has also flourished, allowing mothers in China to send their blood to Hong Kong via agents.
In July, 2017, immigration authorities at China’s Futian port between the mainland and Hong Kong, caught a woman trying to smuggle 203 vials of blood through customs, each with the name of the corresponding pregnant woman on it.
That month, another woman was caught attempting to smuggle vials of blood packed inside her bra.
A recent investigation by CNN found online brokers on micro-blogging platform Weibo offering gender tests for $490. Online services for the same abound in China, with the South China Morning Post reporting that samples were being hidden in toys and packaged food.
China began a crackdown on the illegal trade in 2015, the same year that the controversial One-Child-Policy ended, replaced by a Two-Child-Policy that came into effect in January, 2016. The number of Weibo accounts offering baby sex verification services has since dropped since a high of 52 in 2018 according to the Post investigation.
An AFP investigation found one service where the samples would be sent to Shenzhen and then smuggled across to Hong Kong.
The phenomena of the ‘missing girls’—a demographic observation that there are fewer girls than boys as a result of gender-based sex selection—was first observed by the economist Amartya Sen in 1990.
The numbers are dominated by figures from India and China. The study, by Fengqing Chao of the National University of Singapore and colleagues, estimated 23.1 million girls missing from China stated that 20.7 million were missing in India. These figures were upwardly revised by a factor of two after an error in the baseline measurement was corrected.