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Essay on Prenatal sex Selection
Prenatal sex selection, however, is not easily subject to government regulation. The root cause is son preference. Regulations and laws cannot eliminate the practice if the root cause persists. There is no evidence that the strong son preference among rural Chinese has been reduced in the past decade or so. The persistence of "back-door" services (private connections and bribing) makes it impossible to enforce regulations against prenatal sex determination. Driven by material incentives or by guanxi (private connections), some health and family planning service providers continue to provide prenatal sex determination by ultrasound or other modern technologies, and more and more private practitioners follow suit.
At first, prenatal sex determination by ultrasound was available only in cities and in the more developed coastal areas. With improvements in communication and modernization of health facilities in rural areas, the practice has spread rapidly from city to country, from coast to inland areas, from plains to mountains, and from the more developed to less developed areas. Now even in very poor mountainous villages, people use ultrasound for prenatal sex determination.
The proportion of people expressing a preference for a child of a particular sex persists, although it has decreased somewhat over time. For example, in 1945, 57 percent of college students studied expressed such a preference compared with 28 percent of Ohio couples studied in the mid-1990s as they prepared for marriage. Preferences for a child of a particular sex tend to increase when only one child is anticipated or after the birth of two children of the same sex. When sex preferences were expressed, males were found to be the preferred sex in the United States; in South Asia, East Asia, and North Africa; and in France and Germany. A female preference was noted in the Czech Republic, Lithuania, and Portugal......
