Although gender selection during pregnancy has been banned for decades in China, people has been looking into new ways of knowing the result before the baby was born. Some simple solution would be bribing the nurse when the women went for ultrasound examinations during pregnancy. Although the nurse could not explicitly say whether the baby is a boy or a girl, she could offer candies or toys of different color to the couple -- blue for boy and pink for girl -- the traditional way of distinguishing the two genders. Another probably dangerous way is amniocentesis, which is usually only used to find out babies with genetic diseases like Down syndrome and Edwards syndrome. This procedure has been abused in some places where the discrimination against women is still high.
Apart from some parents who just want to buy respective baby clothes for the newborn, many parents just want to know the gender of the baby. If it is a boy, the whole family will celebrate the news and the mother-in-law of the wife will become especially kind to her. On the contrary, if the test show that the baby is a girl, most people in the family will show disappointment and they will go for a second test just to confirm the result. In the case that a second child is allowed, the family probably won't abort the baby, but choose to have a second baby -- a son.
One of the reason that those people do not want baby girls is that they believe a son will bring more fortune to the family and can continue the presence of the family since any children that he may have will have his last name. They also believe that sons can better take care of them when they are old and daughters will not be able to perform this task well. However, the modern situation is far different than the traditional situation 500 years ago and women nowadays stand more or less equally in most developed and developing countries. There are numerous women with talent and capabilities in the industry and business field and they sometimes even earn bigger money than their male counterparts. Most women now in China could find a decent job when they graduate from college so the chance that "daughters" won't be able to keep her family alive is slim. The modern family structure in China also changed from that of 500 years ago, when married couples will stay with the husband's family for the rest of their life and the wives were not allowed to go back to her own parents unless in some special circumstances. In the old days, "married daughters are like spilt water", as the saying goes. Women were constrained in her husband's house and weren't able to come back and take care of her own parents. This is no longer the case in the modern society as most couples buy or rent their own house and take care parents of both side together. Even if the children could not take care of the parents, the senior people still have a choice to go to nursing homes, to be taken care of by professionals.
Gender selection can be widely seen in most Asian countries. Male children are widely preferred over female children. This preference is based on both long-standing traditions and economic realities in society. Based on my knowledge, in most Asian coutries, there is a tradition that boys are better than girls because people think male can do more hard work and make more money outside. In my opinion, men and women should be treated equally and bias on gender also violates The Fourteenth Amendment in United States. Gender selection cause a lot of social problems like sex selected abortion and gender imbalance.
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