At a population conference in China yesterday, experts said that families in rural areas were still killing baby girls.
Saying that female infanticide is considered “a family matter, a private issue,” Professor Zhu Chuzhu said that the practice still isn’t seen as murder to many villagers. Modern neonatal technology that detects the sex of fetuses allows urban women to have sex-selective abortions, which also contributes to the high ratio of boys to girls.
In China, males have traditionally been more highly valued because they are the breadwinners. “If a woman does not have a male child, her status within the family would be affected, her mother-in-law would dislike her, her husband would dislike her,” Zhu said.
