A preference for boys among Indian-born parents may have contributed to a deficit of more than 4,400 girls over two decades in what researchers in a new study are calling Canada’s “missing girls.”

The research, presented in the Canadian Medical Association Journal and the online CMAJ Open, looks at more than 6 million births in Canada and reveals that a greater presence of boys among Indian-born mothers may in part be linked to abortions in the second trimester, when parents can learn the baby’s sex.

The birth data was compiled from databases administered by Statistics Canada and the Institute for Clinical Evaluative Sciences in Toronto between 1990 and 2011, and 1993 to 2012, respectively.

“The main implication is that among some immigrant communities, males are placed at a higher value than females. This is not just about abortions, it is about gender equality,” said lead author Marcelo Urquia of St. Michael’s Hospital. “I hope that this is conducive to a respectful debate on the value of girls and women in today’s Canadian society.”

His study newly exposes a relationship between induced abortions and the previously reported large numbers of boys among Ontario’s Indian community, said Urquia, noting the data likely explains an imbalance in the rest of Canada too. Some of the “deficit” of girls may be due to “implantation of male embryos,” said Urquia, but the data is insufficient.

While the natural odds of having a boy over a girl are slightly higher, they are consistent across the globe: up to 107 boys for every 100 girls. But Indian-born mothers living in Canada with two children had 138 boys for every 100 girls. In Ontario, that number inflated even more among Indian-born women with two daughters, who then gave birth to 196 boys for every 100 girls.

After abortions, the numbers rise dramatically: 326 boys after one abortion, 409 boys after multiple abortions, and 663 boys for every 100 girls following multiple abortions in the second trimester, when doctors can determine the sex of the fetus.

Miscarriages, or spontaneous abortions, were not linked to the births of more boys, the study found.

The implication is that the disproportionate ratios are a result of “sex discrimination fuelled by son preference” among people from Asian countries, particularly India, whose immigrants have the highest documented male to female ratio in the world, the study says. The new research focuses on immigrants from India as they contribute the most to immigrant births in the country, though disproportionate male births have been observed in other communities as well. The research found an imbalance among Chinese immigrants, but this could not be linked to abortion.

Data did not indicate how long Indian immigrants had lived in Canada and whether that impacted the sex ratio. Nor did it indicate what country the baby’s grandparents were from. These are questions for future research, said Urquia.

“We are currently looking at whether the skewed sex ratios diminish with time after immigration. The idea is that exposure to a more gender equal environment, such as Canada, will result in placing more value on females over time,” he said.

With this new research, it’s no longer a question of whether prenatal sex discrimination exists. It is evident over the last two decades across Canada. The “real question,” said researcher Abdool S. Yasseen III in a published commentary on the studies, is “why this practice persists, particularly in a Canadian society that espouses sex equality.”

For Baldev Mutta, CEO of Brampton’s Punjabi Community Health Services, it’s a question he and other community leaders will have to face. With this new research, he says, it is “time for some soul searching,” in the country’s Indian community.

“This is something that we cannot hide anymore,” said Mutta, a proud father of two grown sons, one grown daughter, and grandfather of two girls. Born in Nairobi to Indian diplomat parents, Mutta came to Canada in 1968 after moving around the world. With an international perspective, Mutta has made an impact on the Brampton Indian community. He helped launch an initiative that flips the script on a traditional celebration called a “Lohri,” meant for celebrating the birth of a boy, but which Mutta and a group of young South Asian women have turned into a movement called Lohri For Her.

“Even in Canada we need to be changing our value system,” he says.

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One of five girls, life coach Kulbinder Saran Caldwell might never have been born had her father listened to her grandmother’s pleas: “Leave your wife,” she told him. All she was having was girls. “She cursed him,” says Caldwell,” and said ‘OK, if you like girls so much you’ll have five.’”

And he had five girls and one son. But Caldwell’s late father, “the first feminist that I knew about,” she says, celebrated his family till death, an outlook that Caldwell has adopted in her own work.

The presence of skewed ratios in Canada’s Indian community doesn’t surprise Caldwell. “Change is difficult for many people,” she says, but initiatives like Lohri For Her are key because they “allow those who believe in gender parity to say it out loud to the community in a celebratory way.”

Kripa Sekhar has been a voice for Indian women as the executive director at the South Asian Women’s Centre. The issue of son-preference goes beyond sex selection. It’s about choice, and the powerlessness that many women she has seen feel. She suspects that in many of the abortion cases, the mothers were coerced.

“A woman who has a male child feels she has fulfilled her obligations to her family,” says Sekhar. She’s seen women come to the South Asian Women’s Centre abused and fearful.

“In no way should this become an excuse to ban abortions,” she says. “This is about the lives of women who need to be able to make their own choices and not be coerced.”