Abortion is legal in India and fairly easy to get for those who can afford it. Since ultrasound is the most common method of detecting the sex of a fetus, most abortions are surgical procedures as the pregnancy is too advanced to terminate using pills.

Sex-selection and abortions are more common among urban, middle-class and educated people since they have more money and access to illegal providers and abortions. The prevalence of the practice varies across the country. In the southern state of Kerala, the ratio of women to men is normal, but in the northern state of Haryana there is a large male surplus. The scale of sex selection is so enormous that one demographer estimates that if current levels of sex selection persist, nearly 10 percent of Indian men will be single at age 50 in 30 years.

Scholars have long suggested that surpluses of men in China and India will destabilize society and increase violence. Sociologists examining the results of nationally representative surveys of tens of thousands of households in India found that in communities with greater male surpluses, there was more rape, child marriage of girls, domestic violence and greater perceptions of sexual harassment.

Although there is a statistically significant correlation between the male surplus and increase in rape of women and girls, the early marriage of girls and violence by husbands against wives, there is no certainty about its cause, as other reasons for increased violence against women cannot be ruled out.

Popular perceptions that attribute the causes of sex selection to general “son preference” and “daughter aversion” are not entirely accurate. Prabhat Jha, an epidemiologist at the University of Toronto, and his co-authors found that Indian parents who intervene typically do so at their second and third births after they have had one or two girls. After parents have one male child, they again leave to chance the sex of their next child. This suggests that most couples who are sex selecting want at least one boy and are willing to have girls.