"If you have a daughter, these women will tell us, they feel they have let their husband or in-laws down. In those circumstances, women are seeking abortions if they can find out that the child is a girl."

Asked what proportion of families would have a preference for a son, she added: "Without a shadow of doubt, more than 50 percent."

An investigation by the Daily Telegraph last year exposed two doctors who were apparently willing to authorise abortions based on gender, though the Crown Prosecution Service decided to press charges.

Seema, 36, an Afghan based in London who works with women's groups, said: "It goes on. Often it is a woman who is brought from Afghanistan and the tribal areas where these beliefs are very strong. It is not frequent but we hear of doctors who will sign off on the papers."

Dr Sudhir Sethi, a NHS consultant paediatrician who specialises in child health in Leicester, told The Independent he knew of 12 families in the city where mothers had travelled to India to terminate a female foetus.He said: "There are no reliable and absolute figures to say how many [are travelling abroad for terminations] but we can say that they are more than just a few, to say the very least.

Illustrating the problem, the doctor cited the words of a woman from Britain's Punjabi community, the region of northern India where selective abortion is most prevalent: "They go on holiday with a belly and a baby inside, and they return with no baby and no belly."

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