SHANGHAI, China -- The lopsided male-female ratio in China caused by sex-selection abortions is worsening, pushed up to 120 men for every 100 women, a government newspaper says.
The report Thursday by the Shanghai Express newspaper on statistics from the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences did not give an official explanation for the disparity, but cited unnamed experts who blamed it in part on pro-abortion attitudes that value boys over girls.
"This kind of imbalance also surely has something to do with the family planning policy" of one child per couple the newspaper said.
Foreign groups blame the one-child policy for encouraging couples who want sons to abort female unborn children or kill baby girls. The resulting shortage of women has meant that tens of millions of men remain unmarried and childless.
On average in the rest of the world, 106 baby boys are born for every 100 girls, but more boys die in childhood and the numbers tend to even out by adulthood.
China has enforced the pro-abortion one-child limit since the early 1980s to coercively slow the growth of its population.