The Interesting Side Effects of Sex-selective Abortions....

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More Missing Women, Fewer Dying Girls: The Impact of Sex-Selective Abortion on Sex at Birth and Relative Female Mortality in Taiwan (Ming-Jen Lin, Jin-Tan Liu and Nancy Qian, 2013, Journal of the European Economic Association)

From the introduction...

More importantly, the results show that conditional on compositional changes in mothers choosing to give birth, the reform reduced relative female mortality rates for higher parity births. In other words, for parents that would give birth to higher parity children regardless of access to sex-selective abortion, the reduced cost of sex-selection due to the reform reduced the number of unwanted daughters that were born, and thereby, reduced female mortality. For such parents, the reform explains 100% of the rise in the fraction of males at birth and over 50% of the reduction in relative female neonatal mortality rates.

From the conclusion, in simpler language...

This paper shows that increased access to sex-selective abortion in Taiwan significantly increased the fraction of males born and reduced the relative neonatal mortality rates of girls. These effects are large in magnitude as they explain all of the increase in the fraction of males born and over half of the decline in relative female neonatal mortality rates during this period. The results make a simple point: there is a tradeoff between pre- and post-natal sex selection for some parents. In the context of our study, such parents are those with strong son preference who have higher parity children regardless of access to sex-selective abortion. The findings suggest that policymakers who wish to ban sex-selective abortion should consider complementary policies that incentivize parents to invest in daughters.

Yeah, that's right. If people in societies in which males are preferred are allowed to terminate female fetuses, then fewer of their female infants die....
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