Let’s consider three ideas.
First, breastfeeding reduces infant sickness and death in poor and tropical places, largely because it insulates the child from water-borne illness.
Second, breastfeeding naturally reduces a mother’s fertility, and so mothers that want to have another child may stop breastfeeding early.
Third, in places where a sons are preferred over daughters newborn girls may be weaned sooner than boys.
If all three propositions are true, then the gender gap in breast-feeding could explain the millions of “missing girls” in societies with a preference for sons. That’s exactly what Seema Jayachandran and Ilyana Kuziemko find using data from India:
Back-of-the-envelope calculations suggest that breastfeeding accounts for 14 percent of the gender gap in child mortality (deaths between ages one and five) in India, or 22,000 missing girls each year.
Son preference is the underlying cause of this excess female mortality, but in a subtle way: Rather than resulting from parents’ explicit decisions to allocate more resources to sons, the missing girls are mainly an unintended consequence of parents’ desire to have more future sons.
They also point out that breastfeeding is used consciously as a natural contraceptive. As modern contraceptive use expands, women might stop breastfeeding sooner, in spite of the health benefits for children. (Before the anti-contraceptive class gets too excited, they recommend a simple solution: couple contraception programs with breastfeeding promotion.)
Clever, and entirely plausible. But that leaves 100-14 = 86% of the excess deaths unexplained. That does not exactly “explain the millions.”
Good theory. And so sad actually.
My first reaction was that of commenter JH above. The paper says: “Back-of-the-envelope calculations suggest that breastfeeding accounts for 14 percent of the gender gap in child mortality (deaths between ages one and ve) in India, or 22,000 missing girls each year. Son preference is the underlying cause of this excess female mortality, but in a subtle way: Rather than resulting from parents’ explicit decisions to allocate more resources to sons, the missing girls are mainly an unintended consequence of parents’ desire to have more future sons.”
How did the authors get from “14 percent” to “mainly”? I haven’t read the article in detail, and 14% is something, but what about the other 86%? Perhaps there’s another analytical step there that we didn’t catch.
I think it may just be a copyediting error. Read as “THESE missing girls are mainly…”, e.g. that the 14% cited are mainly rather than 50+% of the total missing girls.
When preference for boys comes up, I’m always reminded of the paradox that if parents do no more than stop having children once they have a boy, then the proportion of boys in the population will be the same as the unconditional probability of having a boy (close to 1/2). What has changed here is that girls are being killed, inadvertently or not.