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Further light is cast on the epidemiology of Chinese SRB imbalances by patterns of parity-specific SRBs - that is to say, SRBs by birth order - since 1982 (fig. 3). Significantly, SRBs for firstborn Chinese children have remained relatively low and were actually in the biologically ‘normal’ 105 range until the early 1990s. For higher-parity births, on the other hand, SRBs from the late 1980s onward have been stratospheric - biologically impossible - and continued to rise until the year 2000, at which time the SRB for higher-parity births exceeded 150 (higher-parity SRBs reportedly declined somewhat between 2000 and 2005 - but as of 2005 they nonetheless amounted to 143 for second births and to 156 for third births). At one point, researchers hypothesized that the emerging gender imbalance in China was primarily a consequence of the spread of the hepatitis B virus, which is known to skew SRBs in favor of male babies in maternal carriers [11] - but clearly that theory cannot account for the extraordinary and continuing disparities between first births and higher-order births in China. Instead, it is by now widely recognized that these gender disparities are the consequence of parental intervention through the agency of medically induced abortion and prenatal gender determination technology. Chinese parents appear to have been generally willing to rely upon biological chance for the sex outcome of their first baby - but with increasing frequency they relied upon health care technology and services to ensure that any second-or higher-order baby would be a boy.³

Fig. 1. China’s reported SRB by province, 2005 (boys per 100 girls). Source [20].

Fig. 2. Reported child (age 0-4 years) sex ratio in China by county, 2000. Source: Guilmoto and Oliveau [10]. Reprinted with permission.

Fig. 3. China: Reported SRBs by birth order (parity), 1982-2005. Sources [9, 16–20]. Reprinted with permission.

The critical health service elements in this tableau are China’s universal and unconditional availability of abortion conjoined with access to reliable and inexpensive obstetric ultrasonography. According to Chinese researchers, in 1982 diagnostic ultrasound scanning devices were available in health clinics in about one sixth of Chinese counties; over half of Chinese counties had them by 1985, and virtually all had them by 1990 [14]. By the year 2000, sex-selective abortion had become commonplace in China: rough calculations for that year suggest that no less than half of the nation’s higher-parity female fetuses were being aborted and that well over half of all abortions were female fetuses terminated as a consequence of prenatal gender determination. In effect, most of contemporary China’s abortions are thus intentional female feticides.