At the beginning of the prologue of my book, I write that being born female is dangerous to your health, and one of the critical issues that I spoke about in the opening discussion is being born female. In some regions, the dangers of being female start even before birth, in parts of China and India, for example, sex selective abortion is widespread as parents decide, for various reasons, that they cannot bring another girl into the world. Hundreds of thousands of girls have disappeared, unbalancing sex ratios in countries like China, India, Armenia, and until recently, Korea. A powerful force that must be taken into account if women's health is to be improved is the wide spread preference for male children. Both poverty and the demeaning of women account for practices, such as infanticide, neglect and sex selective abortion, all of which are discussed in this unit. These practices are powerful to the point that they have skewed male female ratios and resulted in millions of missing girls. Where poverty is present, it cannot account, on its own, for the choices parents make to reduce the number of girl children. Devaluing girls is the root cause, in large parts of Asia, particularly in regions of China and India, sex ratios have been unnaturally elevated to 115, or even 120, or 130 males for every 100 females, which indicates that many fewer young girls reach childhood than biology would predict. According to demographic projections, a population where all are treated equally, in terms of access to food and healthcare, will have at least as many females as males, and among infants, the sex ratio should be approximately 106 males to 100 females. Girls go missing because the availability of modern technologies, such as amniocentesis and ultrasound, to identify the sex of the fetus during pregnancy combined with access to abortion allows people to eliminate female fetuses. In parts of China and India, more than 95% of fetuses aborted are female, although the use of such technologies for sex selection is illegal, in almost all countries, it is increasingly prevalent. Girls also go missing because of infanticide, a problem that the world has not yet outgrown, those statistics on the practice are very hard to come by. Furthermore, girls go missing because of neglect, studies have shown that differential treatment among infants takes three main paths. Neglecting allocation of food, of developmentally supportive nurturance, such as breast feeding, and of medical treatment or healthcare. Preference for male children is deeply rooted in almost all cultures, but there are cultural shifts in some countries that suggest significant change. Some of these are described in chapter two of my book entitled, From the Beginning, a Deadly Preference, noting particularly the examples of groups working on this issue in the last pages of that chapter.