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Women pregnant with boys get better care

Hindustan Times | By, New Delhi
Mar 28, 2013 11:51 PM IST

Women in India are more likely to get prenatal care when pregnant with boys, according to groundbreaking research that has implications for girls’ health and survival, reports Sanchita Sharma.

Women in India are more likely to get prenatal care when pregnant with boys, according to ground breaking research that has implications for girls’ health and survival.

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The study by Leah Lakdawala of Michigan State University and Prashant Bharadwaj of the University of California, San Diego, suggests sex discrimination begins in the womb in male-dominated societies.

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“It paints a pretty dire picture of what’s happening,” said Lakdawala, MSU assistant professor of economics.

In studying the national health-survey data of more than 30,000 Indians, the researchers found that women pregnant with boys were more likely to go to prenatal medical appointments, take iron supplements, deliver the baby in a healthcare facility (as opposed to in the home) and receive tetanus shots.

Tetanus is the leading cause of neonatal deaths in India. According to the study, children whose mothers had not received a tetanus vaccination were more likely to be born underweight or die shortly after birth.

The researchers — the first to study sex discrimination in prenatal care — also looked at smaller data sets from other countries. In the patriarchal nations of China, Bangladesh and Pakistan, evidence of sex-discrimination in the womb existed. But in Sri Lanka, Thailand and Ghana — which are not considered male-dominated — no such evidence existed.

In India, while it’s illegal for a doctor to reveal the sex of an unborn baby or for a woman to have an abortion based on the baby’s sex, both practices are common.

But knowing the sex of the baby through an ultrasound also can lead to discrimination for those pregnancies that go full-term, she said.

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  • ABOUT THE AUTHOR
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    Sanchita is the health & science editor of the Hindustan Times. She has been reporting and writing on public health policy, health and nutrition for close to two decades. She is an International Reporting Project fellow from Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies at the Bloomberg School of Public Health and was part of the expert group that drafted the Press Council of India’s media guidelines on health reporting, including reporting on people living with HIV.

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