Laura Terzera

Sequences of Birth History among Indian Mothers born between 1956–1960

In many societies the preference for sons is a long-standing cultural custom. In recent decades such preferences have also been fulfilled by sex-selection abortion in countries where parents desiring fewer children find efficient methods to identify the sex of the fetus. India is one of those countries demonstratinga very high SRB in recent decades. According to the most recent estimates, the overall SRB is approximately 110 with meaningful differences among states, but the conditional sex ratio is much higher if the previous births were female. These estimates are supposedly the result of parental strategies aimed at having at least one son in the family.This study highlight such strategies by analyzing the birth history trajectories of a generation of women born between 1956 and 1960, and identifying their characteristics according to the path they belong to.