ABORTION IS ALL ABOUT EMPOWERING WOMEN, RIGHT?:

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, said.

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