The Impact of Prohibited Sex-selective Abortion Policy on Taiwan’s Newborn Sex Ratio
Date Issued
2015
Date
2015
Author(s)
Hsu, Pin-Tzu
Abstract
According to CIA, WorldFactbook, Taiwan’s newborn sex ratio in 2014 is around 1.07, which reveals that the problem of high newborn sex ratio still exists today and female infants constantly disappeared due to sex selection year after year. In order to solve the biased newborn sex ratio problem, NHI implemented a Prohibited Sex-Selective Abortion Policy in May, 2010. Apart from building up a monitor system to control every hospital’s newborn sex ratio, they specifically take more inspection and guidance on those with top 10% and top 25% high newborn sex ratio’s hospital and obstetricians. Compared to the government’s former policies, this one seems to be more compulsory. And this research’s main idea is to test whether this policy significantly improve Taiwan’s newborn sex ratio problem. With the analysis of simple difference, the result shows that hospitals with high newborn sex ratio do have a significant decline in their proportion of men to total infants. Besides, for areas with higher proportion of H-type hospitals, the implementation of this policy forces parents in this area with son preference to face higher cost of prenatal sex selection, resulting in a decline of men to total infant ratio. However, this consequence only exists in the top 50% H-type hospitals, when we set up H-type hospitals as top 10% and top 25% high, there is no significant difference. Since there are still many factors that may cause an effect on newborn sex ratio, we cannot explain the decline of male to total infant ratio in H-type hospitals is completely the contribution of the policy. That is, whether this policy can improve Taiwan’s newborn sex ratio problem still remain further discussion.
Subjects
Sex ratio
Newborn Sex ratio
Infant
Sex Selection
Prenatal
Taiwan
Type
thesis