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That is the question I was asking myself on my trip to China. While I was visiting the museum, looking at the school children exploring and watching there were visibly more boys than girls. Where are the little girls?

Because of the the one-child policy in China put in place nearly 25 years ago, so many little girls are either put for adoption or terminated during pregnancy.

The ultrasound devices enabled parents to see the sex of the fetus in the fourth or fifth month. If it was a girl, then they might opt for a late-term abortion. The procedure is so cheap that there is little barrier to aborting an unwanted fetus. Just 30 yuan (or US$4.00) for an ultrasound.

A lot of people in China are determined to have a son. If they fail to get a boy, most would probably abandon the daughter rather than kill it. A lot of children are being abandoned. The official orphanages are overwhelmingly full of girls, the only boys being those with severe handicaps.

Parents with one or more daughters but no sons are still most likely to abort or cause the death of a daughter.

Chinese girls have borne the brunt of the one-child edict, a coercive effort to limit China's population to 1.3 billion !

There are about seven million abortions a year in China and a report by the International Planned Parenthood Federation says more than 70 percent of the aborted fetuses are female.

Chinese Communist Party leader Hu Jintao for the first time has asked the country's 300 leading demographers to examine whether the policy should be halted. Many of them are urging him to abandon it. Many provinces already allow rural couples to have two children if the first is a girl.

The last national census shows that there are 20 percent more boys than girls below the age of five. In seven provinces, with a combined population of 387 million, there are between 28 percent and 36 percent more boys than girls in this age group. This is huge and most extreme.

More and more girls disappeared from statistics from the early 1980s and the gender ratio widened in favor of boys every year.

Most of the girls are missing because of late-term abortions, although demographic evidence suggests that many others may have been killed or died through neglect and mistreatment in infancy.

Just how many girls are missing and what has become of them is still a matter of demographic guesswork, but it could mean an absence of 40 to 60 million girls by the end of the decade.