dren have been overwhelmingly healthy girls with no brothers, or with one or two sisters, indicating parents’ efforts to work the rules to end up with a son.10 In notes pinned to tiny bodies, villagers have excoriated the regime’s birth policy for forcing them to resort to this extreme measure in order to get a son. In the tougher enforcement environment of the 1990s parents began abandoning their infant daughters for a new reason: to avoid newly steep fines ( Johnson 2004; also AP 1999). In the 1990s and early 2000s, the decline in the number of girls born has also created a growing black market in newborn fe- male bodies. Poor farmers desperate for a son or unable to afford the crippling fines for excess childbearing have sold their daughters to traffickers, who have marketed them to a society newly hungry for girls—to fill the longings of the childless, to make “complete families” of one boy and one girl, and to serve as child brides for poor village men (Rosenthal 2003). Local cadres, sympa- thetic to the villagers’ plight and financially penalized for exceeding birth targets, have looked the other way.

dren have been overwhelmingly healthy girls with no brothers, or with one or two sisters, indicating parents’ efforts to work the rules to end up with a son.10 In notes pinned to tiny bodies, villagers have excoriated the regime’s birth policy for forcing them to resort to this extreme measure in order to get a son. In the tougher enforcement environment of the 1990s parents began abandoning their infant daughters for a new reason: to avoid newly steep fines ( Johnson 2004; also AP 1999). In the 1990s and early 2000s, the decline in the number of girls born has also created a growing black market in newborn fe- male bodies. Poor farmers desperate for a son or unable to afford the crippling fines for excess childbearing have sold their daughters to traffickers, who have marketed them to a society newly hungry for girls—to fill the longings of the childless, to make “complete families” of one boy and one girl, and to serve as child brides for poor village men (Rosenthal 2003). Local cadres, sympa- thetic to the villagers’ plight and financially penalized for exceeding birth targets, have looked the other way.