Georgian Youth Opinions About Abortion and Sex-Selective Abortion

This article was produced in the framework of the "Unprejudiced" project with the support of the Eastern Partnership Programme and the German Federal Foreign Office in January 2022.

Authors:
Natali Hall
Thomas Oswald

In comparison to other countries around the world, Georgia’s of male to female live birth ratio is pretty high, leading researchers to believe that Georgia has a higher rate of sex-selective abortions, which could contribute to the low number of women being born.

In the USSR, abortion rates were considered to be high due to the short supply of family planning materials, such as condoms or cervical caps. However, interestingly enough, only after the dissolution of the USSR, did the male to female birth ratio in Georgia begin to rise. It reached its peak in 2005-2009, when 121 boys were born for every 100 girls.

In our research study, we randomly interviewed Georgian youth to understand their opinions on abortion in general and see if they had any thoughts towards the country’s abnormally high male to female birth ratio.

It was only our goal to show average people and see how they relate to the subject matter, as the research study did not include enough participants to make a conclusion on Georgian youth as a whole. It also should be noted that all subject participants were from the country’s capital, Tbilisi, which may contribute to their political opinions on abortion.

Each interview took around 20-25 minutes on average, and only a few of these participants agreed to be filmed on camera. The others only agreed to answer an open-ended questionnaire.

Our list of prompt questions were as follows (though participants were encouraged to elaborate):

What do you know about sex-selective abortions in your country?
Do you think there's a lot of people who have dealt with abortion?
What percent would you guess?
Do people talk openly about abortion?
How easy can you get info online and offline about safe abortions?
How would you support your friends who had an abortion?
How would you feel talking to your doctor about abortion? (for women)
What can men do to support women in this area?

What we found was that all participants were aware of the existence of sex-selective abortions, but doubted it was prevalent in their own country. The participants also had extremely varying answers on whether abortion was a common issue for women, and they answered that they believed anywhere from 10% to 50% of women had an abortion at some point in their lives. It should be noted that men erred on the lower side of the estimate, and women were more likely to answer a higher percentage. Most participants said that the best way to get good information about abortion was through offline resources. Some elaborated and explained that online resources were not optimized for the Georgian language and therefore weren’t a primary source of information. However, even with offline resources being the leading source for abortion information, 66% of women answered that they would not feel comfortable talking to their doctor about abortion.

Project:

Resources:
Hohmann, S. A., Lefevre, C.A., & Garenne, M. L. (2014). A framework for analyzing sex-selective abortion: the example of changing sex ratios in Southern Caucasus. International journal of women’s health, 6, 889.
Michael, M., King, L., Guo, L., McKee, M., Richardson, E., & Stuckler D. (2013). The mystery of missing female children in the Caucasus: an analysis of sex ratios by birth order. International perspectives on sexual and reproductive health, 97-102.
Michael, M., & King, L. (2016). No Country for Young Girls: market reforms, gender roles and pre-natal sex selection in post-Soviet Ukraine.
Dyson, T. (2012). Causes and consequences of skewed sex ratios. Annual Review of Sociology, 38, 443-461.
Ebenstein, A. (2014). Patrilocality and missing women. Available at SSRN 2422090.
Duthe, G. , Mesle, F., Vallin, J., Badurashvili, I., & Kuyumjyan, K. (2012). High sex ratios at birth in the Caucasus: Modern technology to satisfy old desires. Population and Development Review, 38(3), 487-501.