Taipei - a dropping birth rate is not the only population problem challenging Taiwan, as the gender ratio of newborns recorded 109 males for every 100 females in 2009, the Bureau of Health Promotion (BHP) said Friday.

The natural ratio of its kind should be 105 males per 100 females, said BHP Director-General Chiou Shu-ti. Based on this ratio, the higher number of male births means that "around 4,000 baby girls disappeared last year," according to Chiou.

This suggests that the missing female fetuses were intentionally aborted, Chiou said.

According to BHP statistics, Taiwan had 191,310 newborns in 2009. Among the obstetrics and gynecology departments at hospitals and local clinics nationwide that delivered at least 80 infants in 2009, 34 observed a notable gender imbalance, the BHP said.

One of the facilities even recorded an astonishingly high gender ratio of 178.13 male infants per 100 females, the bureau noted.

While no clinics specializing in artificial insemination were included on the list, the BHP has excluded the possibility that the births in the 34 observed clinics were delivered according to "orders" for male babies, the bureau added, which leaves only elective gender-based abortion as an explanation for the skewed figures.

According to Su Yi-ning, a spokesman for the Taiwan Society of Perinatology, big hospitals will not agree to accept orders for male babies.

Technically, the success rate for separating the Y sperm from semen reaches 70 percent, this does not guarantee a male child, he said.

Source: http://focustaiwan.tw 11 June 2010
Authors: Chen Ching-fan and Elizabeth Hsu