However, the Chinese government did enact laws - including one that outlawed the use of technology to determine the sex of foetuses - to tackle the problem, says the BBC.Accounts of female infanticide can be chilling. An American volunteer at a Guangzhou orphanage was "devastated" to witness the corpses of girl babies abandoned at the home being "carted" in wheelbarrows and "tossed" into dumpsters, and removed by municipal garbage collectors,a 1997 New York Times report says. As a consequence, many Chinese families who preferred male children killed their daughters. (Inputs from PTI) It is also widely thought that the one-child system is responsible for a demographic crisis - according to the UN, 18% of the Chinese population will be 65 years of age of older before 2030.But there is one section of the demographic that shouldn't be forgotten: the thousands, perhaps millions, of female lives that were ended before, or just after they had begun during between 1979 and 2016.To be sure, China is not the only country in the world that struggles with the problem of female infanticide .

Source: Times of India June 14, 2016 08:55 UTC