Gendercide affects women of all ages but bears down especially hard on the youngest. During the period 1980 – 2000, sex-selective abortion displaced infanticide as the primary method for eliminating baby girls.1  After birth, baby girls are more often neglected to death than actively killed, but families still continue to drown, smother, strangle, and abandon baby girls.2

During early childhood, girls remain at risk.3 Due to unequal distribution of food and medical care between boys and girls, 400,000 young girls die unnecessarily each year.4 This is called excess female child mortality, as it vastly exceeds mortality for boys.

As young women enter their childbearing years, they become vulnerable once again. Resources are not directed to maternal care, with the result that mothers succumb during and after childbirth. Currently, 300,000 women die from childbirth and maternal injury every year,5 leaving their older children motherless. Nearly all these deaths are preventable, as can be seen in the example of Sri Lanka. Though very poor, Sri Lanka offers free maternal care, and its maternal death rates are close to those in western countries.6

Women in old age suffer from lack of assets. Because wealth is channeled through the men of the family, older women, particularly widows, are more likely than men to find themselves poor, cast out, and literally unable to survive.7