It seems that Korea’s gap in the number of girls and boys born in the country is spreading with the Korean diaspora. Along with families of Chinese and Indian ethnicity, two countries with extremely disparate ratios of males and females over the last decade or so, a recent study in the US has found that some Korean immigrants are using ultrasound technology to select the gender of their child- especially second or third children:
A study published in March 2008 in the United States in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences looks at data from the last U.S. census in 2000 to conclude that sex selection is probably to blame for an unexpected increase in the number of boy children in American families of Chinese, Indian and Korean origin.
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“It gets worse when you look at second children and third,” Bose says, “If the first child is a girl, then the second is twice as likely to a boy, three times as likely for the third, and it’s not luck that’s determining this — it’s sex selection techniques, female feticide by abortion.”
CBC News, the Canadian national public broadcaster, reported the story, and noted that it has the potential to cause serious repercussions there as abortion is legal and a mother’s right to choose is paramount. In reaction to a mail-in blood test being used to test for male DNA in the mother’s blood, the Society of Obstetricians and Gynecologists of Canada issued a statement restating its position on sex-selection as unethical.
Abortion remains illegal but commonly practiced in Korea. It is also illegal for Korean doctors to reveal the gender of the fetus to the parents in effort to avoid selective abortions, but this regulation is also widely ignored.
