On Abortion and Sex selection

River valley in eastern Taiwan.

Was trolling Google scholar and this caught my eye: from this 2008 paper on using abortion as a sex selection device after the laws were relaxed in 1985-6 period:

Using an individual level dataset constructed from birth and death registries for all individuals born in Taiwan during 1982-89, we find that the legalization of abortion significantly increased the fraction of males born. The effect comes entirely from third and higher-parity births and children born to mothers over the age of 28. For those groups, abortion increased the fraction of males born by 0.7 percentage-points for post-reform cohorts on average (from 51.5 percentage-points in 1982-84 to 53.5 percentage-points by 1989), accounting for nearly 100% of the observed increase in sex imbalance during this period. The results on sex-differential mortality show that legalizing abortion decreased EFM by 25%. Our results suggest that approximately 15% of parents selecting post-natally before the reform would have substituted to abortion as a method of sex-selection. Taken literally, this suggests that for every 100 abortion of female fetuses, 15 lives of girls born are saved.

What they mean by the last is this: when sex-selection abortion is forbidden, the sex ratio at birth moves back toward the natural norm. But then a large number of unwanted female children are born. What happens to them? One way or another, all over the world, a portion are killed via stealthy or open infanticide. Because fewer females are born in Taiwan, there is less infanticide of female children...
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