A study published in the British medical journal "The Lancet" says that 10 million fetuses may have been aborted in India over the past 20 years because of ultrasound sex screening. Canadian and Indian researchers analyzed data from a national survey that included 1.1 million households in 1998. They found that the certainty of a sex-based abortion increased if the preceding child was a girl. They surmise that based on natural sex ratios in other countries, around 13.6-13.8 million girls should have been born in India in 1997. However, the actual number was 13.1 million and the missing presumed aborted. An interesting finding was that the "girl deficit" was higher in educated mothers than illiterate women.

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