Are there specific public health policies that could be enacted to help reverse the trend?
This is a hard issue to target through public health efforts. If there’s a concern that girls aren’t receiving proper medical treatment, governments can’t do much more than increase the amount of available vaccinations or health services in general. This might help those girls, but not necessarily – research has shown that if you introduce the option of vaccination into a population that before had none available, the first ones that people bring to be vaccinated are their sons, long considered their most valuable children. However, as girls become considered more valuable, we might see more girls being vaccinated. Governments also have the option of introducing vaccines only for girls, but that can be politically unpalatable. Although public health solutions may help the girls they target, they are at best topical solutions for one effect of the gender imbalance, and do nothing to actually help reverse it. Instead, governments are trying to give people incentives to make them value the
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