Discrimination Begins in the Womb: Evidence of Sex-Selective Prenatal Investments

This paper investigates whether boys receive preferential prenatal treatment in a setting where son preference is present. Using micro health data from India, we highlight sex-selective prena-tal investments as a new channel via which parents can practice discriminatory behavior. We find that mothers visit antenatal clinics and receive tetanus shots more frequently when pregnant with a boy. Pref-erential prenatal treatment of males is greater in regions known to have strong son preference and among women whose previous children are female. We successfully rule out other mechanisms such as selective recall, medical complications that might cause male babies to receive greater prenatal care in general, son preference-based fertility stopping rules and reverse causality due to sex selective abortions. Our calculations suggest that sex-selective prenatal care in tetanus use explains between 4-10.5 % of excess female neonatal mortality in India. We find similar results using data from other countries like China, Bangladesh and Pakistan; thus, we show the extent of sex selective prenatal care in large parts of South