British Indians are aborting girls in record numbers. But honestly, who’s even surprised?

They say you can take an Indian out of India, but India out of an Indian? Probably not, if the data compiled by the UK’s Office for National Statistics (ONS) is to be believed.

According to the figures, there has been a record imbalance in the number of girls and boys born to Indian parents between 2021 and 2025. The ONS data suggests 118 boys were born to Indian mothers for every 100 girls. The national average of the UK is 105 boys per 100 girls.

While this data may have taken the UK by surprise, causing alarm bells to ring, for someone born in India, this is nothing new. There’s a reason why sex determination is banned in India, for it is not used to host gender reveal parties, but to kill the unborn female child.

And the most interesting part is that these abortion numbers would be much higher if some people didn’t have their religious beliefs stopping them from doing so.

According to the 2011 census in India, the sex ratio (number of females per 1000 males) at all India levels was 943, and the same for rural and urban areas were 949 and 929, respectively.

The Indian diaspora’s obsession with a male son encompasses more financial and religious reasons than actual love. For centuries, women have been seen as a burden, who will get married into another family, and it is only the son who will carry on the family name and take care of the parents in old age.

So in reality, sons in Indian families are seen as a retirement plan more than anything. And as far as the ‘taking care’ part goes, we all know that eventually falls on the daughters-in-law, eventually a girl, albeit someone else’s.

Yes, there will be some naysayers who will dismiss this by saying things are changing, and they are, but the patriarchal mindset remains in the majority of Indian families, which can be seen in micro acts on an everyday basis.

Whether it is a festivity where women are huddled in the kitchen while men discuss ‘worldly’ issues like politics and the economy, or making a house a home, all responsibilities that actually make life worth living fall onto women.

But I digress.

Experts analysing the figures say the imbalance becomes most evident with third births.

While first and second children born to Indian mothers align with the national average, the ratio shifts sharply for third children — rising to 114 boys for every 100 girls in 2021/22, before increasing further to 118 boys per 100 girls in both 2023/24 and 2024/25.

Back home, India started a family planning campaign as early as 1952, and by the mid-1970s, the government launched a campaign called Hum Do, Humare Do (One Family, Two Children). India’s exploding population aside, anecdotal evidence suggests most families living in urban settings in today’s age usually have two kids, or sometimes even one.

Many state governments in India also make individuals ineligible for public sector jobs if they have more than two children. Though this definitely did not stop one man from Haryana from forcing his wife to have 11 children so he could finally have a son. (How that made my blood boil is a different story altogether, and no, he could not correctly name all his children.)

But when these individuals move abroad, the story, as we can see, is completely turned on its head. For many, having a third child, if it means having a boy, is no longer a difficult choice to make.

There are also numerous news reports that highlight many Indians living in India who travel to Thailand to have a baby boy through IVF. The IVF process, though generally used to help couples having trouble conceiving a child, can also allow doctors to implant embryos of only the desired gender. The practice is banned in India, for obvious reasons, while Thailand in itself has no legacy of sex selection in fertility. Talk about taking our own problems and dumping them on to another country.

The most amusing part of all this is that, despite all this obsession with having a male heir, multiple studies have repeatedly shown that a woman and her husband should actually live with the woman’s parents, not the man’s. Why? Because it shows better mental, physical and financial outcomes for both the parents and the couple. Why not with the man’s family? Because the study also shows the woman’s parents treat her and the son-in-law with genuine love, care and respect compared to if the situations were reversed.

Guess who the joke is on?