when parents prefer boys, they may have children until they have the number of boys they want. This means that girls will tend to grow up in larger families, and many of the girls will be born in a family that really wanted boys. In India, girl babies stop getting breast-fed earlier than boys, which means that they start drinking water earlier and have accelerated exposure to waterborne life-threatening diseases like diarrhea.35 This is mostly the unintended consequence of the fact that breast-feeding acts as a contraceptive. After the birth of a girl (particularly if she has no brothers),
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