Every year, as millions of women marry, they dream of starting a family, of having their homes filled with tiny cries and the happy laughter of gurgling babies. In India however, pregnancy is too often followed by the question of
whether the unborn child is a girl or a boy.

A preference for sons or for more sons than daughters has been documented in several countries in the world.

Long after you have driven away from the cluster of villages around the Usilampatti belt of Madurai, the images of bright-coloured hair ribbons, fragrant jasmine flowers in neatly combed hair, deep vermillion bindis on the forehead and the silver anklets worn by little girls with sparkling, wide,

Highlighted by sensational titles such as "The endangered sex" (Miller, 1981) or "More than 100 million women are missing" (Sen, 1992), studies have long drawn attention to the unfavourable life chances of females versus males in various parts of East and South Asia.

Infanticide has been practiced in all continents, but little dependable primary data exist on this subject. Presented here are the findings on female infanticide for a rural, south Indian population.

This paper discusses contraceptive use and discontinuation among women in north Vietnam, in the context of a strong culture preference for sons and a stringent two-child population policy. Among a random sample of 1432 married women aged 15-49 in a rural province in north Vietnam in l994, nearly