India
World Ranking Unavailable
Many researchers estimate that India is second only to China in the number of annual abortions. Lack of official data prevents it from being ranked in the worldwide abortion statistics.
The Scale of the Crisis
India Abortion Estimate
Gendercide in India
Child Sex Ratio:
An Indicator of Gendercide
India now has 54,197,555 more males than females. In other words, over
50 million missing girls
mostly killed through sex-selective abortion and infanticide.1
In northwest areas of India
121 boys
born for every
100 girls
This figure is not based on actual data, but estimates, which are in our view highly impacted by political agendas. If true, this exceeds even China Daily’s report on the National Family Planning Commission estimate of 13 million annual abortions in China.
Nonetheless, India and China clearly account for most of the abortions and gendercide worldwide.
Gendercide is the genocide of a specific gender group—currently, the mass killing of girls.
It is especially concentrated in India. Modern ultrasound technology now makes sex-selective abortion easy.
The child sex ratio (CSR), which is the number of girls there are relative to the number of boys in a society, is one measurable indicator of gendercide. The natural CSR at birth has long been known by demographers to hover around 105 boys born for every 100 girls.
The 2020 CSR in India is 108. 176 boys per 100 girls, but in northwest areas, it is even worse.2 Put another way, for every 1000 baby boys born, only 924 girls are born.
Highest Global Abortion Rates*
The abortion rate is the number of women out of every 1000, age 15-39, that had an abortion in a single year.
Abortion Data Source
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Worldwide, official abortion statistics are under-reported and incomplete. In some cases, like Guatemala, no data is available. In India, (by most estimates, second only to China in abortion numbers) official data is too incomplete to use. Our data source is the Abortion Worldwide Report (AWR) [Informe Mundial del Aborto (IMA)] (Jacobson and Johnston, 2018). They provide reported and estimated abortions by year for 110 countries and other areas through 2015. You can find updates to this data here.
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The Work
PassionLife travels to northern India at least once a year to train pastors in the Gospel of Life and present models of pregnancy crisis intervention. PassionLife’s simplified, reproducible resources on biblical bioethics, prolife apologetics and crisis pregnancy intervention are translated and freely available in Hindi and Bengali.
A small percentage of Christians are now collaborating across the nation to help families choose life. One example is Save the Lives, an Indian non-profit partnering with PassionLife to train up church members in prolife values and introduce models of pregnancy crisis intervention to churches.
The Challenge
In 2018, The Guardian reported “More than 63 million women are ‘missing’ statistically across India.” The Washington Post added, “The number of newborn female babies compared with males has continued to plummet, even as the country grows more developed and prosperous.”
They further report that there are 6.2 million more baby boys, age 0-4, in India today than there are girls. Moreover, the lingering dark power of the caste system continues to challenge the idea of the equal value and dignity of all human life.
Where abortion is most concentrated, you are most needed…
Three ways YOU can advance the work:
Connect
Do you have connections in India? You can send them Gospel of Life Hindi or Bengali resources and introduce us to them or encourage them to reach out to Mark Nicholson at mnicholson@passionlife.org.
Who knows? You may open a door for advancing a new work in one of the neediest places on earth!
Give
Your gift to PassionLife will advance the work in India, where we continue to partner with local Christians to rescue the innocent by helping mothers in crisis.
Sign Up & Pray
Join the PassionLife newsletter to see the impact of your gift and pray for the progress and challenges faced by our Christian brothers and sisters as they proclaim the Gospel of Life in India.