China’s policies to control the population have skewed their gender ratio

See The Missing Girls: How China’s One-Child Policy Tore Families Apart: A now-ended adoption program created the perception that Chinese girls weren’t valued. One adoptee, once hidden in a grocery bag, found there was more to her own story by Liyan Qi of The WSJ. Excerpts:

"China is grappling with a demographic crisis, with dropping birthrates and a rapidly aging population. The policies to control the population have given way to new ones in the opposite direction. But a legacy of the one-child policy is a dearth of women of childbearing age.

Because of a government decree that led to forced abortions and sterilizations, millions of girls were never born or were hidden from authorities. In the process, China’s gender ratio became increasingly skewed, with 117 boys born for every 100 girls in 2004, compared with 106 in 1980, United Nations data showed. 

A U.N. Population Fund study based on China’s 2010 census estimates the country’s “missing girls,” or females who in regular circumstances would have been born but who were absent from the population, at 24 million."