THE DISAPPEARING NUTRITIONAL BIAS AGAINST CHINESE GIRLS

1. INTRODUCTION Modern technology for prenatal diagnostic testing, especially the ultrasound B scan, first became available in China in the 1980s, reached county hospitals by the late 1980s, and rural townships by the mid 1990s (Chu 2001; Zhu, Li, and Hesketh 2009). The new methods dramatically improved the accuracy of prenatal sex determination over older methods, which have been part of traditional Chinese medicine for centuries. Around the same time a strict population control policy was introduced in China, which was seen as crucial to the success of market reforms on which the country had just embarked. The policy comprises a number of laws and administrative rules that regulate family size, including marrying and having children at a late age, having easy access to contraception and abortion, and the conditions under which a second child is permitted. The One-Child rule applies mostly to urban residents and state employees while a second child is generally allowed after 5 yr, especially if the first child is female (Li 2004). Coupled with this strict family policy and strong son preferences, prenatal sex selection reached epidemic levels in the late 1980s, as many women opted for abortions upon discovering that the fetus was female. The prevalence of female-selective abortions raised sex ratios at birth (SRB) from 108 boys per 100 girls in 1982 to 121 boys per 100 girls in 2005. The Chinese government, alarmed by the sharp increase in the SRB, attempted to eliminate prenatal sex selections by banning the use of ultrasound for sex determination apart from medical reasons in 1993, and by enacting the Human Reproductive Technology Ordinance of 2000 that banned sex-selective pregnancy termination. Both efforts appear to have been mostly fruitless, however, because of the rapid privatization and deregulation of health care in China and the widespread use of cheap mobile ultrasound machines during this period. Several explanations for the changes in the SRB have been offered by other researchers. Banister (2004) notes that while China "is the most extreme example" (p. 22), other Asian countries also report abnormal sex ratios. She describes the period preceding the introduction of sex selection technology, the years 1964-1977, as the period with "the lowest-ever excess losses of girls in Chinese history" (p. 24) and credits, among other factors, the Communist Party's ideology of gender equality for these low SRBs. Li (2002) also investigates the factors underlying son preference and finds that the One-Child policy, the socioeconomic condition, and the sex ratio of children present are the most influential factors. Zhu, Li, and Hesketh (2009), using 2005 survey data, find that "Sex selection abortion accounts for almost all of the excess males" (p. l). (1) In the current context, with exceptionally high SRBs as a result of the wide availability of prenatal gender screening that strongly favors boys in China, is there still postnatal discrimination against Chinese girls? We are not the first to ask whether the recent advances in medical technology that allow parents to make prenatal sex selection decisions could have unintended consequences for the postnatal well-being of girls. Banister (2004) and Echovirus (2007) note that prenatal sex selection should result in fewer unwanted girls, declines in female infanticide, and reductions in "excess" female mortality because of neglect. Our contribution is to investigate a potential form of neglect by testing for inequality across distributions of nutrient intake for girls and boys in China, using micro data from various years between 1991 and 2004. Independent of the prenatal sex selection issue, gender bias in development indicators such as nutrient intake has interested economists for several decades. The question here has been whether women and girls, in particular, receive fewer household resources than men and boys in developing countries, which could lead to poorer relative health and nutrition status. …