“Missing girls” – China and India

In India and China, the world's two most populous nations, parents have chosen to abort hundreds of millions of baby girls. According to Samanth Subramanian (The National) "Indians are aborting more female fetuses than at any time in their nation's history, with the practice growing fastest in the more affluent states. There are now 914 girls for every 1,000 boys under the age of 6."

Furthermore, the BBC News reports that in India, "eight million female fetuses may have been aborted in the past decade." 
In India, “missing girls” phenomena could be explained by the existing sex composition of the family. Girls with no older sisters have similar chances of survival as boys. Girls conceived in families that already have a daughter, experience steeply higher probabilities of being aborted or of dying in early childhood. Cultural factors provide the overwhelming explanation for the "missing" females." Parents still often pay a dowry when their daughters get married. And sometimes you can hear the opinion: “girls cost more and produce less.”  

Even bigger gender disparity exists in China, where "the ratio is 837 girls per 1,000 boys." Through the 1980s, as the one-child policy (the population control policy that restricts urban couples to only one child, while allowing additional children in several cases, including twins, rural couples, ethnic minorities, and couples who are both only children themselves) came into force, parents who desired a son but had a daughter often failed to report or delayed the reporting of the birth of their daughter to the authorities. According to an Economist report, "The destruction of baby girls is a product of three forces: the ancient preference for sons; a modern desire for smaller families or one-child policy; and ultrasound scanning and other technologies that identify the sex of a fetus."
Rather than neglecting or abandoning their daughters, the parents may have offered them up for formal or informal adoption. A majority of children who went through formal adoption in China in the later 1980s were girls, and the proportion increased over time. According to Sten Johansson and Ola Nygren (1991) adoptions accounted for half of the so-called "missing girls" in the 1980s in China.
We can observe now the potentially disastrous social consequences of this sex imbalance. The shortage of women may have increased mental health problems and socially disruptive behavior among men and has left some men unable to marry and have a family. The scarcity of females has resulted in kidnapping and trafficking of women for marriage and increased numbers of commercial sex workers, with a potential resultant rise in human immunodeficiency virus infection and other sexually transmitted diseases. There are fears that these consequences could be a real threat to stability of these countries in the future.
That’s why, to persuade more families to have girls in China, it has decided in some cases to reward families that already have daughters. Today publicity campaigns promote “girls” in China. 

Billboard in Hebei Province. The advertisement reads, “There's no difference between having a girl or a boy — girls can also continue the family line.”
More information you can find here:

http://globalvoicesonline.org/2012/04/03/videos-female-gendercide-and-infanticide-in-india-and-china/

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/programmes/this_world/7050657.stm

 Olena