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After four and a half years of squabbling over the issue, India has finally decided to outlaw the abortion of healthy fetuses just because they are girls.

Feminist groups which have been lobbying hard for the ban will be delighted, but their joy is misplaced for it does nothing to undermine the roots of a preference for sons.

Clearly, aborting children simply because they are the wrong sex is a pretty unpleasant practice. The uncomfortable irony - and it is one that will draw howls of protest from many well-meaning people - is that the widespread abortion of girls may well be the most effective way of shaking societies out of their desire for sons.

Let's look for a moment at why families want sons, a desire particularly pronounced in Sino-centric cultures and in South Asia. In many traditional Asian societies, women leave their parents at marriage and become part of their husband's families. Girls are a cost to their parents for more than 15 years.

Then the fruits of that early investment - work, children, ancestor worship and support in old age - are picked by a boy's family. And in some cultures, a girl's parents have to pay for the privilege of her loss. A pretty shabby deal.

Boys, on the other hand, can continue the family name and the worship of ancestors. Having greater earning power than girls, they can ensure their parents' well-being in old age, and they can bring in a wife, a dowry and children. No wonder parents prefer boys.

Having a son ensures a woman's status in her husband's family. In fact, the charge for sex-selective technology has been led by women, many of whom feel pressured to produce sons at all costs.

This is particularly the case as families shrink. In times gone by, women would go on bearing children until they produced enough sons. But now many families - often actively encouraged by their governments - want to limit themselves to one or two children. It becomes vital to ensure that the first one is a boy.

So what happens? The ratio of boys to girls born, which is naturally about 1.05, remains normal for the first birth. For the second child, there are noticeably more boys born than girls. A fourth child is a third more likely to be a boy than a girl in China, and twice as likely in Korea. If you break down the figures according to the number of existing sisters, the distortion is more dramatic still.

This new and terrible phenomenon is brought about by technology which allows us to tell before birth what sex a child is. Or is it? Long before abortion was on the scene, infanticide and neglect took care of unwanted births. The governor of the Chinese province of Shanxi in the mid 19th century, Li Xongxi, wrote: "There are even those who drown every female baby without keeping any. The poor regard this as an almost legitimate means of maintaining their minimal standard of living."

Recent research in north India shows that although girls are naturally stronger than boys, they die at abnormally high rates. According to one well-designed study, some 120 girls died for every 100 boys - 45 more than would be normal in a country with no prejudice in the treatment of girls. And the death rates were higher for girls with more educated mothers, suggesting that these mothers were using their education to favor boys more successfully. Is aborting a female fetus really worse than letting a girl die of neglect after a few brutish and hungry years?

But what of the marriage market, cry critics of sex-selective abortion. One is forever reading that China's one-child policy has caused parents to abort all the girls, leaving men desperately short of wives. For now, this is nonsense. First, it is only in the large cities that couples have really restricted themselves to one child. Second, children born under the one-child policy are not even of marriageable age yet.

The marriage market is determined more by the growth rate of the population than by the sex ratio at birth. Men tend to marry women younger than them. In a growing population, where each generation is bigger than the last, the group of men aged 25 will have a considerably larger group of 18 year-old women to choose wives from.

It is only when there is a drastic fall in births that each generation becomes smaller than the last. China's major fertility fall came in the 1970s, before the one-child campaign. So men born in the late 1960s have fewer 20 year-old women to choose as wives. It is the fall in fertility that has caused the wife-shortage.

In India, where despite a recent dramatic slowdown, the population is growing at a fair pace. Men now have a huge advantage in the marriage market. Dowries were little known in north India just 60 years ago, except in the highest castes.

They surfaced in the 1950s, after medical advances increased a child's chance of surviving. Fewer deaths allowed the population to grow more rapidly and increased the difference in size between the group of men of marriageable age and the younger pool of potential brides.

Suddenly, parents of this relatively large pool of young women needing a husband had to compete harder for a groom for their daughters. They resorted to "bidding" for husbands through dowries.

Dowries have become one of the major disincentives to bearing female children in India.

Women seeking to abort female fetuses after gender testing swallow the cost of the procedure by saying they would rather spend a few hundred on a test now than several thousand on a dowry later. Women's lives are cheap because they are plentiful relative to men.

Now bring sex testing and abortion into the equation. Women become less plentiful relative to men. Men have to work harder to find a bride. If the balance tips far enough, we may see the reappearance of bride-prices.

Men paying for wives is a far more ancient practice than women paying for husbands. Its revival would do much to make girls more acceptable. However, population projections show that an awful lot of sex selection would be needed to have that effect. If family size shrinks gradually to just two children, and half of all couples whose first child is a girl undergo testing to ensure the next is a boy, there would still be enough wives to go around for 98 out of every 100 men.

Macro-economic changes have their part to play, too. If the sub-continent follows Southeast Asia down the path of export-led growth, women in India, Bangladesh and Pakistan may find themselves as much in demand in the formal economy as are women in Malaysia and Indonesia.

More jobs for women means more earning power, more earning power means a more equal chance of contributing to the support of aging parents. Bang goes another parental prejudice in favor of boys. (A decent social security system supporting Asia's aging populations would have the same effect, but that seems further off than more sexual equality in the work force.)

In Sino-centric societies, a cultural insistence on continuing the family line is more important than economics. Here, too, selective abortion is both a symptom and a solution. It will certainly exacerbate the shortage of women in the marriage-age bracket already created by rapid fertility falls. Too few women means many men will have to go without wives. No wife means no legitimate offspring, and that in turn means the end of the family line.

Legislating against sex selection is not the answer. Dowries are already illegal in India, but they remain prevalent. Abortion is against the law in many countries - it just moves to the back streets.

The Indian state of Maharashtra outlawed abortion as early as 1988. In 1990, the number of clinics in the state performing the service was estimated at 318, and some 16,000 tests a year were being conducted in the city of Bombay alone.

One Indian reproductive health specialist snorted: "The moment we ban something, we just give the police the opportunity to make more money." Abortion on the grounds of sex is illegal, too, in China and Korea, but extremely distorted ratios of male to female babies born show the practice is common in both countries.

The fact is, the technology to determine fetal sex exists. The same technology is needed to screen for genetic disorders, a growing risk as the average age of first-time motherhood rises.

No amount of legislation will make either the technology or the demand for it disappear. What's more, scientists are getting closer to finding ways to choose the sex of a baby even before conception.

We now find it perfectly acceptable that parents should be allowed to choose the number and the timing of their children. Choosing the sex of children is the inevitable next step.

We would do well to look it straight in the face, in the knowledge that societies have a habit of adapting themselves to demographic changes before they become too drastic.

Copyright 1996 Asia Times.

(c) 1996 Chamber World Network International Ltd.