Current trends, consequences and policy implications Sex Imbalances at Birth:

available national census data indicates that in recent decades, sex-ratio imbalances have grown in favour of boy children in a number of South Asian, East Asian and Central Asian countries. Prenatal sex selection leads today to distorted levels of sex ratio at birth (SRB), reaching between 110 and 120 male births per 100 female births in several countries pointing to the intensity of gender discrimination and son preference. The trend has shifted geographically over time, beginning in a number of Asian countries (China, India, and the Republic of Korea) in the 1980s, followed by some countries of the Caucasus (Azerbaijan, Armenia and Georgia) in the 1990s, and has more recently been followed by Montenegro, Albania, and Vietnam. This distorted demographic masculinization, which has serious social and economic implications, is not a natural phenomenon but is achieved through a deliberate elimination of girls. The alarming trends in sex ratio imbalances at birth highlight son preference in several cultures and the misuse of scientific and technical advances in pre-natal sex-detection have combined to create these rising SRBs. Census data have often provided detailed mappings of these variations, both within countries an