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NEW DELHI — India's
traditional preference for baby boys has resulted in the
extermination of generations of females with thousands
of fetuses or new born babies being killed daily for no
apparent reason rather than being girls.
"One of the most
disturbing revelations came from a midwife who said she
had killed hundreds of newborns," journalist Gita
Aravamudan told Agence France-Presse (AFP) in an
interview wired Friday, July 20. "She had lost count."
Aravamudan has
written a book, "Disappearing Daughters", about the
gruesome practice in the Hindu-majority country,
including stories of women forced to endure successive
pregnancies to produce male children and of others
forced to have up to four abortions in five years.
"Female infanticide
is akin to serial killing. But female feticide was more
like a Holocaust," Aravamudan writes.
"A whole gender is
getting exterminated. It is a silent and smoothly
executed crime which leaves no waves in its wake."
In the past,
India's unwanted baby girls have been drowned in milk,
burned alive in sealed mud pots or fed milk laced with
poisonous seeds.
But nowadays, they
are killed in their mothers' wombs as technology enables
doctors now to know the gender of the fetus in early
pregnancy stages.
India has only 927
females for every 1,000 males -- far lower than the
worldwide average of 1,050 females.
Almost 7,000
girls are killed through abortions every day, according
to a UNICEF report.
The British
medical journal The Lancet has put the loss of females
at 10 million over the past two decades.
"With technology
making it easier to find out the gender of a fetus in
earlier stages of pregnancy, these numbers will only
increase," said Aravamudan.
In India, sons are
typically seen as breadwinners.
According to Hindu
traditions, a son is also supposed to light his parents'
funeral pyre.
On the contrary,
girls are often viewed as a burden because of the
matrimonial dowry demanded by a groom's family.
Abuses
Fearing abuses of
their daughters, many Indian women are determined to
abort themselves if they find their fetus is a girl to
spare her a nightmarish life.
"Better to send her
straight to heaven rather than make her endure this
beating and kicking around," one woman is saying in
Aravamudan's book.
Others said are
overpowered by their husbands.
"What do you want
from me? What power do you think I have over my womb?
None," said another woman. "Do I have the right to
decide if I can keep the child if it is a girl? No."
The killing of
girls has led to grave consequences in some Indian
areas.
In some regions,
an acute shortage of women has resulted in men buying
brides and sharing them with their brothers.
Aravamudan's book
tells of Tripala Kumari, 18, whose husband killed her
because she refused to have sex with his brothers.
To stop the
gruesome practice, India has introduced tough laws
against tests to determine fetal gender for non-medical
reasons.
Early July, the
Indian government announced plans to register all
pregnancies.
The data would
permit authorities to focus efforts on areas with a
large gap between the number of pregnancies recorded and
births.
However, the rules
are widely flouted by doctors in what activists say is a
multi-million-dollar business. The tests are done
secretly and are often hard to prove.
"Our laws against
dowry and feticide are excellent, but only on paper,"
said Aravamudan.
"And when the
girl who was buried alive is asked, for what sin was she
killed." (Surah 81: Verse 8 and 9). |
