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ATEHGARH SAHIB, INDIA, October 26, 2003: India’s “son complex” is visible in this prosperous market town on the rich plains of the Punjab. Girls, by the thousands, are missing. Local parents in search of a son, a prize in Indian culture, have used ultrasound machines to determine the sex of the fetus growing in the mother’s womb. If the fetus is male, the parents keep it, if it is female, they often abort it. J. K. Banthia, the Indian census commissioner, estimates that 25 million fetuses have been aborted in the last 20 years because they were female. Some states have mounted stepped-up enforcement campaigns that include public education, inspections and edicts from religious leaders. But Mr. Banthia, the Indian census commissioner, said he believed that the government had only slowed the spread of the practice. “I wouldn’t say it has decreased,” he said. Abortion is legal in India, but it is illegal to abort a fetus because of its sex, and so the determination tests are banned. India’s health minister, Sushma Swaraj, recently proposed that the government begin an advertising campaign warning that there would not be enough women for men to marry if the trend continued, a situation that some say already exists here in northern India. Officials are also considering paying families a supplement if they have a girl.

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