Female Foeticide in India

Technology, if not making things better, has certainly made things easier. Female infanticide used to be achieved in heavily male-centric places like India and China after the birth of the child by the rather simple means of starving female infants or leaving them to die in the wilderness. But today, thanks to ultrasounds, mothers and fathers no longer have to go through the agonizing 9-month wait to discover whether or not they will be blessed with a boy or “cursed” with a girl. The problem, according to Gendercide.org, is a significant concern in the Third World:

The phenomenon of female infanticide is as old as many cultures, and has likely accounted for millions of gender-selective deaths throughout history. It remains a critical concern in a number of "Third World" countries today, notably the two most populous countries on earth, China and India. In all cases, specifically female infanticide reflects the low status accorded to women in most parts of the world; it is arguably the most brutal and destructive manifestation of the anti-female bias that pervades "patriarchal" societies. (1)

A recent study performed in India indicates that now that pre-natal screening can reveal the sex of the baby before it is born, parents are aborting female fetuses at an alarming rate: approximately 500,000 female infants are aborted each year, equaling some 10 million female fetuses over two decades.

[Researchers] discovered that the 'girl deficit' was more common among educated families, especially in homes where the first-born was a girl. The desire to have a male heir was found to drive families to sex-determination tests and termination of pregnancy if the foetus was female. Highlighting the continuing trend of falling female birth rate in India, the study said: 'Prenatal sex determination followed by selective abortion of female foetuses is the most plausible explanation for the low sex ratio at birth in India.' (2)

The Indian Medical Association (IMA), however, claims that the number of 10 million female fetuses ending in abortion is an exaggeration. The IMA says that the usage of pre-natal screening to determine the sex of fetuses waned after the Supreme Court in India made strict rulings against the practice.

One of the researchers responsible for the study said that

the data was collected in the course of their more than five years long research from atleast one million households, both in urban and rural areas and people of all classes were covered. The census data also came handy to them to arrive at conclusions about the missing girls. (3)

Whether the number of female fetuses aborted is 12 million, 10 million, or 8 million is of little consequence to the people who see the effects of female foeticide in their villages. A writer in India explains:

Tired of losing out daughters even when they are in the womb and seeing entire villages full of just men, residents of Naura — a small village near Banga in Punjab — have decided they must do something before it is too late.

Two days ago when news came that an unborn girl had been murdered in her mother Manjit Kaur's womb, hundreds of villagers wearing white assembled outside Manjit Kaur's house and took out a "funeral procession". ...

For the uninitiated, for long Punjab has seen the killing of its unborn girls with alarming persistence and cruelty. At present it has a sex ratio of 874 girls to 1,000 boys against the national average of 933.

It continues to lose one-fourth of all girls who would be born. In certain areas, the problem is so acute that a Bill Gates Foundation-sponsored study reported a ratio of just 628 in Khamano block of Fatehgarh Sahib. (4)

Sources:
(1) Gendercide.org, “Case Study: Female Infanticide.”
http://www.gendercide.org/case_infanticide.html

(2) One World South Asia, “Study Estimates Female Foeticide at Ten Million in India.”
http://southasia.oneworld.net/article/view/125571/1/1893

(3) DNA India, “Female Foeticide Report Is Incorrect, Says IMA.”
http://dnaindia.com/report.asp?NewsID=1007036

(4) Times of India.com, "Punjab Village Cries for Unborn Girls."
http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/articleshow/msid-1377138,curpg-1.cms