The simple answer is sex selection - typically, an ultrasound scan followed by an abortion if the fetus turns out to be female - but beyond that, the reasons for a gap half the size of the U.S. population are not widely understood. In India, where women have achieved political firsts still not reached in the United States, sex selection has become so intense that by 2020 an estimated 15 to 20 percent of men in northwest India will lack female counterparts. Proponents of population control began talking about nudging sex selection along. Six months later Steven Polgar, the organization's head of research, went public with the notion that sex selection was an effective population control method. Taking the podium before an audience of scholars and policymakers at a conference sponsored by the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD), Polgar "urged," according to the meeting's minutes, "that sociologists stimulate biologists to find a method of sex determination, since some parents have additional children in order to get one of specified sex."



In the years that followed, Population Council President Bernard Berelson endorsed sex selection in the pages of Science, while Paul Ehrlich advocated giving couples the sons they desired in his blockbuster The Population Bomb. A wide range of population control strategies were on the table at the time, but by the end of the decade, when the NICHD held another workshop on reducing birth rates, sex selection had emerged as an approach that participants deemed "particularly desirable." He extolled sex selection in an article for the New Scientist, explaining that population growth was so great a threat that the drawbacks of a skewed sex ratio would have to be tolerated, grim as they were. And sometime in the mid-1960s, Population Council medical director Sheldon Segal showed the institute's doctors how to test human cells for the sex chromatins that indicated a person was female - a method that was the precursor to fetal sex determination. In 1975, AIIMS doctors inaugurated sex-selective abortion trials at a government hospital, offering amniocentesis to poor women free of charge and then helping them, should they so choose, to abort on the basis of sex.

The doctors touted the study as a population control experiment, and sex-selective abortion spread throughout India. But he neglected to mention that shortly after his stay in India he stood before an audience at the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development and described sex selection as a method of population control. The organization has also funded research on sex selection and sex ratio imbalance at the local level. Lingering anxiety over taking on issues involving abortion, activists and demographers have told me, now has UNFPA reluctant to address sex selection head-on at the international level - a reluctance that has left the organization's enemies to twist the issue to fit their own agenda. In China, India, Korea, and Taiwan, the first generation shaped by sex selection has grown up, and men are scrambling to find women, yielding the ugly sideblows of increased sex trafficking and bride buying.

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