Birth of a Daughter

Birth of A Daughter: A Blessing Or A Burden? By Aleena Farasat

Somewhere in the world today, a family will find out they're having a girl, and there will be a feeling of doom in the room. It is not just a thing in Pakistan, or even in South Asia, it's a pattern that shows up in different countries all around the world. China's decades of one-child-policy enforcement left the country with roughly 116 boys born for every 100 girls, against a natural global average closer to 107. Nearly 76% of Japanese parents still expect financial support from sons in old age, compared to just 6% who expect the same from daughters.

The details shift by country. The underlying math, that a son is somehow the safer bet, doesn't.

Nowhere is that math more visible, or more openly spoken, than in Pakistan, which is where this piece is really rooted.

"Congratulations! You've been blessed with a baby girl." Sadly, not many families are blessed enough fully feel that. They are far too quick to label their daughters a burden, one they'll eventually have to send off with enough baggage to fill a room, just so she can live a respectable life elsewhere.

When a daughter is born, the parents get congratulated in various ways, depending on which daughter she is. If she's a firstborn, the congratulations are wholehearted and warm. But eventually, that warmth fades away if you keep having girls.

Don't worry, you're still wished, just with eyes full of pity and a smile full of sympathy. If you're one of the unlucky ones, you might hear,

"Fikar mat karo beta, In sha Allah, Allah agli dafa bete se nawazey ga." (Don't worry, child, Allah will bless you with a son next time)

Or

"Allah naseeb achay karay, betion ke naseebon se dar lagta hai" (May Allah grant her a good fate, a daughter's fate is a frightening thing).

Probably said with sincerity and love, but entirely inappropriate if the parents themselves have no problem with a second, third, or fourth girl.

The world is changing. Contraception, family planning, and reproductive health are being discussed more openly than ever before, even here in South Asia. And yet many families still cling to the same damaging gender preferences.

“Don't stop having children until there's a son to carry the name and the lineage.”

The cycle repeats, generation after generation. These preferences don't start at birth, they start even before it, through prayers, through unsolicited advice, and through endless tips on how to conceive a son. The scale of this preference can be seen in the numbers. The UN estimates Pakistan's sex ratio at birth at around 109 boys for every 100 girls, well above the natural biological ratio of roughly 105. A smaller gap than China's, but the same instinct underneath it.

Most young parents today are educated enough to know that the gender of their child doesn't matter, that both will be loved equally, and both will be there for their parents when it counts. A child doesn't need to be a boy for their "budhaapa" (old age) to be easier. Note the word "most," though. There are still regressive voices out there who frown even at the birth of a first daughter.

With rising inflation, most couples now want a small family with the "perfect" combination. One boy and one girl. If you're blessed with two boys, bravo! You must have done something right. But if the opposite happens and you have two girls, you're pressured to try again. This time, the recipes for conceiving a son come from even long-lost relatives you've ever exchanged pleasantries with. Quranic verses to be read a specific number of times, at precise hours, strange diets, or the latest and most bizarre one, injecting yourself with baking soda because the body apparently needs to be more alkaline to conceive a boy. These are the actual lengths people will go to in order to avoid having a daughter.

The remedies continue until a boy finally arrives, to be spoiled rotten. And if it still doesn't happen, then clearly something is wrong with the mother…because how could this society dare to shift any blame towards a man?

This pressure often means shorter gaps between pregnancies, which carries real health risks. Shorter intervals are linked to higher maternal and child mortality. And it takes a toll on the mother's mental health too, she's not just contending with postpartum depression, but the fear that something is "wrong" with her for not producing a son.

One study found that women whose firstborn was a girl moved on to a second pregnancy seven weeks earlier, on average, than women whose firstborn was a boy.

Once she's born and the gender is confirmed, the next battle begins. One that lasts a long time. Boys aren't entirely exempt from this, but girls get the worst of it. A full physical inspection of an infant who has no idea she's being scrutinized from head to toe. Her future, apparently, depends on her skin tone, how sharp her features are, how perfect her nose looks. If a girl doesn't have the desired features or complexion, the worry starts immediately. Will she get a good rishta (marriage proposal) from a well-off family? Boys go through a milder version of this, but at the end of the day, wealth alone secures them a good match.

The scale of this obsession shows up in the market. Skin-lightening products account for around 60% of India's dermatological market, and women make up roughly 80% of skin-whitening sales worldwide, in a global industry valued at $8.8 billion in 2022 and still growing. Google search interest in "skin whitening" is among the highest in the world in Pakistan specifically.

It doesn't stop there. It grows and evolves as she does.

"She seems a bit short for her age, people like tall girls for their sons."

"Stop getting so tall, where will we find a boy tall enough for you?"

"Why is your skin breaking out? Get it checked before it scars, people notice these things."

Weight matters too, in this version of beauty. The heavier the girl, the fewer prospects she's assumed to have. And just when this constant commentary has done its damage, making her question her worth a thousand times over, comes the crowd with remedies for losing weight, brightening her skin, growing her hair, fixing her nose. All traits she inherited from the very family now pointing them out. The irony!

Education brings its own set of mindsets. Some people see no point in educating a daughter, since she'll end up an unpaid housekeeper or, at best, a nurse in someone else's home, under the title of wife or daughter-in-law.

According to the Pakistan Economic Survey, the numbers back up how widespread this thinking is: about 22 million children in Pakistan are out of school, 12 million of them are girls. Two million more than the number of boys out of school. The national literacy rate stands at 62.8%, split sharply along gender lines: 73% for men, 51.9% for women.

Others prioritize a son's education over a daughter's, reasoning that she won't carry the same financial responsibility for the family. There's a related, damaging idea of looking down on families who are financially supported by a daughter without ever asking what happens to her if she's widowed, or if her marriage ends. Divorce remains deeply taboo, and that taboo often pushes families to pressure daughters into staying in abusive marriages rather than risk the family's reputation.

This bias even shows up in professional spaces globally. The World Economic Forum’s global gender gap score in 2025 for all 148 economies included in this edition stands at 68.8% closed. That's how deep rooted this unfairness is.

Then there are parents who genuinely want their daughter educated and spend their savings to make it happen, yet still expect her to stay the same naive, agreeable girl who'll quietly absorb verbal or physical abuse from a husband or in-laws. If she speaks up for herself, patriarchy has many tools to label her as faulty as she "talked back," proof of “poor upbringing."

This tension played out publicly in 2014, when Pakistan's Medical and Dental Council capped female admissions to medical colleges at 50%, in response to the fact that women made up 70–80% of medical students but fell below 50% once it came time to actually practise. That's where the term "Doctor Bride" came from. The idea that women were entering medical school for a better marriage prospect, not a career, since a medical degree was seen as an advantage on the marriage market.

Why give her all that knowledge and self-respect, her basic right, only to marry her off to people who won't accept her unless she arrives with half a furniture showroom's worth of "gifts given out of love" from her parents?

Which brings the argument back to where it started. It would be easy to file all of this under Pakistani culture, or South Asian tradition, or religion, the usual, convenient scapegoats. But the same deep-rooted hierarchy shows up in China's missing-girls statistics and in Japan's koseki system, or the World Economic Forum's global gender pay gap report. Remove the local customs and what's left is the same biased calculation, repeated across very different economies and religions that a daughter is a slightly riskier investment than a son.

None of this is to overlook the parents who are breaking the cycle, who keep their doors and arms open for their daughters to return to whenever they need to, who let them build careers instead of orienting their whole lives around marriage, who choose their child's happiness over the opinions of people who've never truly invested in her.

Talking about this feels like the end of an era. A light at the end of a long tunnel, finally coming into view. But there's still a long way to go. But maybe it's close enough now that one day, we'll walk into that hospital room and celebrate warmly and sincerely, with nothing but love in our eyes, the birth of a daughter, anywhere in the world.