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Having sons is important to many Asian cultures, and now U.S. families from those groups seem to be asserting the same preference.

A new analysis of the 2000 Census shows that among U.S.-born children of Chinese, Korean and Asian-Indian parents, the odds of having a boy increase if the family already has a girl or two.

The findings "suggest that in a subpopulation with a traditional son preference, the technologies are being used to generate male births when preceding births are female," co-authors Douglas Almond and Lena Edlund said of their findings, appearing in today's Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

"We should emphasize that our paper does not imply that sex selection is practiced by all or even most Asian Americans," they said in an e-mail response to questions. Most Chinese, Korean and Asian-Indian parents do not sex select.

The discovery that some do, however, seems to be a new development in the United States, because the researchers didn't find the same variance in the 1990 census, said Almond, of Columbia University, and Edlund, of the National Bureau...