Tirana - Drita, 31, covers her face with trembling hands. She just learned that after giving birth to three daughters in four years she is pregnant again with a girl, an unforgivable crime in the patriarchal Balkans that clearly prefers boys.
She tries to mutter a few words, but her mother-in-law, Sanije, silences her with a hard stare.
"A fourth one is a curse... either she will abort or there is no place for her with us," she says, handing a bundle of bank notes to a doctor at a private clinic in downtown Tirana.
Selective abortions are common practice in Albania and some other Balkan countries where an imbalance between boys and girls at birth is blamed on a preference for boys.
"Prenatal sex selection continues to be a persistent practice in Albania although the legislation specifically bans it," said Rubena Moisiu, head of an obstetrics hospital in Tirana.
It gradually leads to a demographic masculinisation of society, already visible among young children.
In countries such as Albania, Kosovo, Montenegro and in western Macedonia there some 110 male per 100 female births," Christophe Guilmoto of the French Research Institute for Development, who specialises in gender imbalances, told AFP.
This figure is higher than the average biological sex ratio at birth of 105 boys to 100 girls. And the regularity of the 110-100 ratio over the years attests to the imbalance.
According to the national statistics bureau, on January 1 there were 31,000 fewer women than men in Albania's population of 2.8 million.
Albania is among the few European countries where men outnumber women, and this despite a very strong emigration for economic reasons over the past two decades, mainly by men.
AFP
