<P> Sex - selected abortion, abandonment, and infanticide are illegal in China . Nevertheless, the United States Department of State, the Parliament of the United Kingdom, and the human rights organization Amnesty International have all declared that infanticide still exists . A writer for the Georgetown Journal of International Affairs wrote, "The' one - child' policy has also led to what Amartya Sen first called' Missing Women', or the 100 million girls' missing' from the populations of China (and other developing countries) as a result of female infanticide, abandonment, and neglect". </P> <P> The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation offered the following summary as to the long term effects of sex - selective abortion and abandonment of female infants: </P> <P> Multiple research studies have also found that sex - selective abortion--where a woman undergoes an ultrasound to determine the sex of her baby, and then aborts it if it's a girl--was widespread for years, particularly for second or subsequent children . Millions of female fetuses have been aborted since the 1970s . China outlawed sex selective abortions in 2005, but the law is tough to enforce because of the difficulty of proving why a couple decided to have an abortion . The abandonment, and killing, of baby girls has also been reported, though recent research studies say it has become rare, in part due to strict criminal prohibitions . </P> <P> Anthropologist G. William Skinner at the University of California, Davis and Chinese researcher Yuan Jianhua have claimed that infanticide was fairly common in China before the 1990s . </P>

Problems of the one child policy in china