Around the world, 117 million girls and women are missing - an amount that surpasses the combined casualties of both WWI and WWII. China is missing nearly 10% of its female population due to gendercide, and India is missing nearly 8%. While gendercide is mainly considered the gender-based abortion of a female fetus, it also includes the severe neglect of a girl child after she's born, causing her to die. However, a large portion of families around the world drown, strangle, and smother baby girls. Gendercide also occurs across a variety of ages; girls are especially vulnerable during childbearing. They infrequently receive the medical attention they require, allowing them to contract a variety of maternal diseases.
Another widespread form of gendercide is honor killings or bride burnings, which almost 55,000 girls fall victim to per year, in which girls can be burnt to death because of dowry disputes or if she violates her family's honor. Concerned that their daughters might tarnish their name in the community by either refusing to get married early, leaving the house unaccompanied, wearing revealing clothes, or by doing something as miniscule as burning the food, families attempt to counter these supposed violations of honor with another sin - murder. Because of gender-based abortions, severe neglect, honor killings, and bride burnings, Pakistani girls face a mortality rate 66% higher than Pakistani boys, and 1 in 4 Indian girls do not make it past puberty.
Gendercide and child marriage are caused by similar reasons; girls are widely unwanted because they're seen as an economic burden. In countries like India, having a girl child comes with the expense of having to invest in her marriage and dowry, which can be a drain on a family's overall income. China's former one-child policy left its impact; many families preferred for that one child to be a boy, so they went to oftentimes unsuccessful extremes in the hopes of ensuring the birth of a boy, and such ideas carry into today even after the fazing out of the one-child policy.
The skewed gender ratios that gendercide creates feed into the dominance of human trafficking, domestic violence, and sexually transmitted diseases like HIV and AIDS. In other cases, poor families, because of the scarcity of brides available, buy one bride to play the role of wife to all the men in a particular household. The shortage of unmarried women available also increases the prevalence of child marriage - since less women are available, men seek to marry even younger girls, and more girls fall into the trap of early forced marriage. Regions with unequal gender ratios also have excessive criminal activity. Studies conducted in India have portrayed a correlation between murder rates and a male surplus. Gender ratios influence murder rates more than poverty and illiteracy do. And finally, China, one of the countries in which gendercide reigns the most, also has the world's highest female suicide rate. Researchers believe that this could have some link to the fact that women face cultural pressure to abort or neglect their daughters, sometimes against their will.
However, that's not to say that even direly poor countries can't rise above and diminish entirely gendercide. Sri Lanka serves as a prime example; its government provides free maternal care, which has eliminated the commonplace neglect of girls, allowing them to gain access to the medical resources they need. Because of the action they've taken to advance the situation of gender equality in the country, Sri Lanka now has maternal mortality rates nearly as low as those of developed Western countries. Other aid programs and initiatives are also helping to lessen the rates of gendercide. A program called Care for Girls pays families that keep their daughters $31 - while this may be considered bribery, it's for these impoverished families a large portion of their annual income and alleviates financial stress partially. Programs of this sort are helping - between 2004 and 2014, China was able to decrease its most disproportional gender ratio that's been recorded, 121 male births for every 100 female births, to 116 male births for every 100 female births.
In conclusion, gender-based abortion and gendercide isn't simply a pro-life or pro-choice matter as abortion in the United States is. These girls are maimed or killed simply because of their gender - it's a matter of human rights and equity.
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