Genocide of India's daughters

[Cancer_Researcher]

Untitled Document

Ten million female foetuses have been illegally aborted in India by mothers desperate to bear a son. What will become of this nation of ever fewer women?

Anne Sebba investigates:

May you be the mother of a hundred sons - this is the Sanskrit blessing given to a Hindu woman in India on her wedding day. And the minute she falls pregnant, there is the traditional chanting of mantras by the other women of the family, calling for the foetus, if female, to be transformed into a male.

Increasingly, such age-old beliefs are becoming a curse in India, as, in this deeply patriarchal society, women have become obsessed with giving birth only to sons.

‘Asking me why I need a son, instead of a daughter, is like asking me why I have two eyes and not one,’ says one woman in the northern district of Haryana, who has just had an abortion after discovering that the baby she was carrying was female.

This woman is by no means alone in taking such shocking and drastic measures to avoid giving birth to a girl. In fact, such is the widespread determination to produce only sons that, since ultrasound scans became widely available in the Eighties, the number of abortions carried out on female foetuses in India has risen at a terrifying pace.

Even by the most conservative estimates, sex-selective abortion in India now accounts for the termination of some ten million female foetuses over the past 20 years. That means that each year a staggering half a million girls have been prevented from being born.

‘This is the world’s biggest genocide ever,’ says Chetan Sharma, founder of the Delhi-based organisation Datamation, which campaigns against female foeticide. According to India’s 2001 census, the number of nought to six-year-old girls per 1,000 boys was 927, a dramatic dip from 962 in 1981.

‘The future is frightening. Over the next five years we could see more than a million foetuses eliminated every year,’ says Dr Sabu George, who has charted the problem. ‘At this pace we’ll soon have no girls born in the country. We don’t know where it will stop.’

The female shortfall is not a new problem in India. Even during the days of the Raj, and the first census in 1881, the British made efforts to eradicate female infanticide. But the problem of female foeticide is a new phenomenon fuelled by advances in technology and the widespread liberal attitudes to abortion.

In 1971 India was one of the first countries to legalise abortion, partly intended as a means of population control.

‘Today, anyone can walk into a government hospital and ask for an immediate abortion up to the 20th week of pregnancy, free, merely by saying there has been a failure of contraception,’ explains Kalpana Sharma, whose columns in The Hindu newspaper regularly rail against the dangers of undervaluing women.

Women cannot admit that they knew the sex of their baby in advance of having an abortion because that is illegal in India.

According to a law passed by the Indian government in 1994, hospitals, clinics and laboratories are not allowed to use prenatal diagnostic techniques — including ultrasound scans like those pregnant women in the UK routinely undergo at 12 and 20 weeks — for the purpose of determining the sex of the foetus.

However, this law has been widely ignored — because local officials are reluctant to fight the will of the people.

Women know that if they produce only daughters, they will be pitied by everyone around them — or, worse, abused. In many cases, it is even considered a betrayal of the family.

‘I want a son as we have a big business,’ says another woman who has undergone nine abortions of female foetuses. ‘I want what my husband has built from scratch to go to his own blood.’ But it is not just that in Indian families it is the son who will carry on the family name or business and take care of elderly parents.

Daughters are an enormous financial burden because when they marry, a dowry must be found. Although it is illegal both to give and receive a dowry, the practice continues and the demands made by the groom’s family are increasingly nothing short of extortion, according to Kalpana Sharma. These days, they often include jewellery, clothes, furniture, white goods, cars and even a new home.

Lavish weddings in exotic locations and with mammoth feasts are also expected, and the groom’s family often makes last-minute demands. ‘Raising a female child is like watering your neighbour’s plant,’ says one woman in Gujarat.

For the boy’s family, it is gain, gain, gain. But for the girl’s parents, financing the dowry and wedding often involves selling off land and spiralling into debt that becomes impossible to pay off.

Lifestyle choice

Female foeticide isn’t common only among poor families. Aborting a female foetus is increasingly becoming a lifestyle choice among wealthy women.

The states with the lowest ratios of girls to boys — 820 females to every 1,000 males — are also the most prosperous, like Punjab, Gujarat and Haryana. It is not simply that affluent women believe they will have a better standard of living if they have only sons.

It means, too, that there is more money to spend on sport, leisure and consumer goods, as well as more time to pursue a career. There is also the issue of land inheritance. Daughters are now legally entitled to an equal share of land when their parents die and many families do not want to see their legacy divided up.

The division of land has become a major factor in recent years because although sex-selective abortions are still largely an urban phenomenon, the easy availability of mobile scanning machines means doctors are now doing brisk business in rural areas.

Getting a licence for the equipment is easy and many so-called ‘doctors’ offer women the service without being qualified or registered.

There are 25,770 officially registered pre-natal units in India, but one doctor estimates there are as many as 70,000 ultrasound machines operating in the country. Nobody reports the unqualified technicians because it is not in their interest to do so.

Even the qualified doctors in registered clinics have ways of circumventing the law against using ultrasound tests to determine the sex of the foetus. If the ultrasound test shows a male foetus in the womb the doctor simply tells the nurse: ‘I think this calls for sweets,’ a well-known code to mean ‘Good news, it’s a boy’. No paperwork is filled in, so there is no evidence of illegal practices.

Anyone found guilty of organising an illegal abortion theoretically faces a prison sentence of between three and five years and a fine of 10,000 rupees (£118). But only two men have been convicted since the law was introduced 12 years ago.

So why do such highly-trained doctors show such a disregard for the ethics of sex selection? Some doctors insist they are performing a valuable service by preventing divorces.

Others claim that the doctors’ union has been over-zealous in protecting its own, and that the doctors and lawyers have formed a powerful nexus in the fight against official clampdowns — to their mutual financial benefit.

Lucractive practice

The practice is hugely lucrative for doctors. Private doctors charge a minimum of 5,000 rupees (£60) for an abortion and often much more, depending on how far into the pregnancy the woman is. Dr Puneet Bedi, a specialist in fetal medicine, says: ‘Everybody knows that this technological wonder [ultrasound] is being used at random, to diagnose and kill girls. Foeticide is performed by trained professionals with licences and registration numbers; it is a multi-billion rupee industry.’

Many social workers in India believe it is unfair to accuse women of being complicit in this genocide, a denial of the girl’s fundamental human right of being allowed to be born. A few believe they are acting out of kindness: ‘Why bring a girl into the world who will be subjected to a dreadful life of misery?’ one told me.

There are many stories, even in relatively prosperous families, of young girls being undernourished while boys are well-fed, or girls being treated as maids while the sons lead a life of leisure.

But more often than not, an abortion to terminate the development of a female foetus is an action forced on a woman by the twin pressures of a powerful mother-in-law and husband. A key reason for the woman’s compliance is the fear that they may be replaced by a younger, more fertile woman who will produce sons if they do not submit.

Alarmingly, this fear has spread to Indian women in the UK who face the same patriarchal attitudes. An increasing number are travelling to India for an abortion, as far fewer questions are asked there than in Britain.

‘There is definitely an increase in abuse faced by Asian women in the UK who are mothers of girls,’ said Jasvinder Sanghera, who runs an advice centre in Derby. ‘We see women who are beaten or abused by their husband and especially their mother-in-law for producing daughters. They are not considered worthy or dutiful daughters-in-law.’

Tragically, there are already disturbing consequences of the falling ratio of females to males in India. In Gujarat, and some villages in Punjab, there are so few higher caste women that tribal women are being imported to service whole families of men — father, sons and brothers. The demand for sexual services is such that in some areas middlemen have started supplying girls for between 500 rupees (£6) and 60,000 rupees (£711) a month. The money goes to the husband or father who hires her out.

Long-term worries are not simply the fear that such an imbalance will result in the rise of prostitution and sex trafficking. The danger to women’s emotional and physical health from repeated abortions is huge.

Sex-selective abortions are often performed later in the pregnancy and are therefore more dangerous. Only 20 per cent of all abortions conform to the provisions of Indian law and those performed outside hospital often result in complications that lead to the deaths of thousands of woman.

So how can this demographic catastrophe be averted?

The Indian government is taking steps to impose regulations on the registered ultrasound clinics throughout the country, but Chetan Sharma, of Datamation, says that local officials are guilty of corruption and will simply continue to turn a blind eye.

Feminists believe that until Indian society begins to value women, no amount of laws will help.

‘Until women take control of their own lives and refuse to give in to pressure, nothing will change,’ says Rasil Basu, who has made a film about the crisis called Vanishing Daughters. ‘Empowerment of women is the only answer.’

Kalpana Sharma, of The Hindu newspaper, believes the beginnings of change have been prompted by recent revelations that girls are consistently doing better than their male counterparts at school and college and are beginning to branch into traditionally male fields like engineering and medicine.

‘I know women who have been persuaded to have multiple abortions and who feel absolutely rotten, but they have no choice — either abortion or divorce,’ says Sharma.

‘But I sense things are changing with a younger generation of very well-educated women who are not prepared to put up with this. Women are starting to find their courage, even if it means leaving their marriage.’

[Cancer_Researcher]

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Missing Daughters of India HelloJi

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Female Genocide in India
and the 50 Million Missing Campaign


Rita Banerji



1. Even before I had initiated 'The 50 Million Missing Campaign' in December 2006,[1] it was clear that one of the toughest challenges for the campaign would be to overcome public scepticism both within and outside India, about the veracity of its claim. How could fifty million plus women just disappear from a country in a period that spans less than a century?[2] That number is about the size of the entire populations of Sweden, Austria, Switzerland, Belgium and Portugal put together.

Figure 1. The 50 Million Missing campaign poster. Designed collaboratively by designer, Pam Kelso, Fernando G. Aguinaco (background photo), and Hervé Blandin (foreground photo).

2. So, in January 2008, while, in my capacity as founder of the 50 Million Missing Campaign, I was addressing a local chapter of the Rotary International in Kolkata as an invited guest speaker, I began by dispelling the first myth. 'Missing' is actually a euphemism, I confirmed. These are not 'missing persons' cases. Here the term in fact means—eliminated. However, 'missing' has stuck ever since the Noble Laureate, Dr. Amartya Sen, first used the term in 1986 to draw attention to the vast divergence in India's natural gender ratio.[3] Where the average male to female ratio in most human populations is about 100:105, Sen, using extrapolations from the census data, estimated that India was 'missing' about 37 million women—women who should have been in the population but could not be accounted for. Sen's warning rang no bells for the Indian administration, and the gender downslide continued. By 2005, almost twenty years since Sen's first alert, the International Herald Tribune reported that 50 million women were 'missing' from India's population.[4]

3. The public reservation, however, is with the actual likelihood of such a mass-scale elimination occurring. Occasionally one reads in Indian papers about baby body parts being found in a well in the compound of some clinic, or a young woman dying of burns under suspicious circumstances due to a supposed kitchen accident, but there is nothing in the news that suggests a blood-bath on the scale of a genocide. To drive home the point to my Rotary audience, I put up on the overhead a two columned table relating to the annual rates of female homicide in India. This slide included the means of elimination, and the estimate for the annual rate for each category.

Table 1. Annual Rates of Female Homicide in India

Female foeticide approximately 1 million[5]
Female infanticide approximately 25000 in the State of Kerala alone[6]
Dowry-related murders approximately 25000[7]
Preadolescent mortality 1 in 6 dies before 15 yrs (CRY)[8]
Mortality rate 40% higher for girls under 5 than boys the same age (UNICEF)[9]
Maternal mortality rate (MMR) 136,000
(1 woman dies every 5 minutes due to pregnancy-related causes) (WHO)[10]

4. The number one means of elimination I pointed out, is female foetal abortions. An estimated 1 million female foetuses are selectively eliminated in India each year, and that number is expected to rise to 2.5 million within the next few years.[11] Method number two is female infanticide, a practice that has a long history in India. So far there has been no national average estimated for female infanticide, largely because it is difficult to track down with there being no administrative compulsion for citizens to register births. Nevertheless, existent data gives an indication of the scale of the practice. In the state of Kerala, one of India's most progressive states, with a literacy rate of over 90 per cent, it is estimated that about 25,000 new born girls are killed every year.[12] In other states like Bihar, where the issue of gender bias is plainly discernable, one survey reveals that mid-wives interviewed admitted to being paid to kill almost 50 per cent of the baby girls they delivered.[13] As the number three method of elimination I listed dowry murders, also known as 'dowry deaths.' Despite the fact that a majority of dowry-related homicides of young married women in India are never even filed with the police, in the late 1990s it was estimated that at least 25,000 young married women were cold-bloodedly murdered by their husbands and in-laws in dowry extortion cases.[14] That number has continued to rise, as the practice of dowry itself spreads to communities, like tribal groups, that traditionally never had the custom of dowry.

5. Yet another means of elimination of females in India is the abnormally high mortality rate for girls under 5 years. In 2007, UNICEF reported that the mortality rate for girls under five was 40 per cent higher than for boys of the same age.[15] Most of these girls are dying of nutritional and medical neglect. The neglect is often deliberate, for parents are not only biased in how they distribute food among their sons and daughters, but often they do not want to pay for a sick daughter's medical treatment—cases that would in most countries amount to negligent homicide.

6. And the fifth means of female elimination in India is maternal mortality. In 2007, India accounted for the highest maternal mortality rate in the world—with one woman dying of pregnancy-related causes every five minutes.[16] The reasons cited for this are inadequate medical care and early-aged pregnancies in girls due to child marriages. Generally in cases of child marriages both the bride and groom are children. But the issue is really with the girls because the health impact is on them. Their bodies are underdeveloped and they are too young to bear children—which results in complications and deaths during childbirth, but with serial pregnancies from a very young age there is a complete breakdown in the health of these girls by the time they enter adulthood.

7. While ultrasound facilities are sprouting around every street corner in India and reaching remote villages in mobile vans at competitively affordable pricing, people still opt for the cheapest abortion facility available to cut back on the cost of operation and hospitalisation. In a culture, where women have practically no say or control over their own reproductive processes, and essentially serve as wombs for patriarchy's narcissistic desire for an endless lineup of sons, India's deplorable maternal mortality rate is a certified killing machine. Looking at all this data through a comprehensive table, I pointed out to my Rotary audience, that the numbers for the death rates of females in India, tot up very rapidly, and it becomes quite evident how India today is liable for one of the worst genocides in human history. The 1948 charter for the United Nations Convention on Genocide states that genocide entails the prevention of birth of a group, its selective killing, or causing it grave physical or mental harm.[18]

8. If the Indian public is currently perplexed about the issues of female genocide in its country, it is that much more confounded about its possible cause. In a recent survey that the 50 Million Missing Campaign distributed, most respondents felt that poverty and illiteracy were the major contributing factors to female genocide. The assumption therein is that if India's massively impoverished and illiterate masses were to receive a decent education and a reasonable level of income, the nation will pull itself out of this social quagmire. However, the ground realities speak otherwise. Surveys show that some of the highest rates of female foeticide occur among the comfortable middle and upper classes, who not only have the means to access adequate medical facilities, but who show an equal prevalence towards the practice of dowry and dowry-related murders.[19] There is no obvious correlation to indicate that the poor and illiterate in anyway contribute more towards female genocide in India than do the wealthy and educated. So what could be driving this systematic female annhiliation?

9. To answer that question I put up my final slide for my Rotary audience. It was titled 'The Acculturation
Figure 2. The Acculturation of Female Homicide of Female Homicide,' and listed the following terms: sati, bride-burning, dowry-death, doodh-peeti, kuri-mar, and johar. Each of these terms I explained, was a method of female homicide that was widely practised, widely accepted, and culturally-specific to India. Though sati, the practice of the burning alive of a widow on her husband's pyre, was banned by the colonial British administration in 1829, since India's independence in 1947, there have been at least forty reported cases.[20] The public still flocks to temples built to deify the practice of sati, and the government of India dare not take these monuments down.

10. In two of India's most sacred towns, Benaras and Vrindavan, thousands of widows who have been driven out of their homes or some who have escaped sati, eke out a living by begging on the streets or prostituting themselves.[21] Doodh-peeti, another old tradition still practiced in the north-west, is a method of killing new born girls by drowning them in buckets of milk. Kuri-mar is a reference to the communities in northern India that traditionally killed all their daughters. The Kuri mar or 'daughter killer' communities at one time openly bragged about having 'no daughters' —only sons. Most new-born girls would be buried underground in earthen pots. It is said, that Sita, the heroine of India's 2000-year-old epic saga, who was found in a pot underground by her adopted father while he was ploughing the field, was perhaps one of the earliest girls thus rescued. Johar is the practice that socially compelled women to commit individual or mass suicide, when they were attacked and raped by rival communities, in order to preserve their family's honour. When a practice acquires a name in a society, it becomes acceptable at the subconscious level of that community's collective thinking. Its premise becomes sacrosanct, and the lines between crime and culture, and what is permissible and reprehensible, become blurred. It is this deep, historically-rooted acculturation of female homicide that is sustaining female genocide in India.

11. Evidence of this is found in the average Indian's response to most of the crimes mentioned above. Where the murder of a new born by her own parents, or the gang lynching of a young married woman by her husband and in-laws would send shock waves through most communities, in India it hardly evokes a response. If pressed for one, the response is most likely to be a bland, nonchalant acknowledgement that such things do happen here.

12. Another ascertainment of the invidiousness of this acculturation is evidenced in the appalling gender ratio of expatriate Indian communities in the U.S., U.K., and Canada. Despite being wealthy, well-educated, and socially well placed, expatriate Indian communities have engaged in female foetal abortions to such an extent, that there is now a conspicuous skewing of the gender ratio in these communities, so much so that governments and International bodies are beginning to take note. In 2006, in a speech at the United Nations General Assembly, it was announced by Nicholas Eberstadt that the unequal gender ratio achieved in some of these communities was 'biologically impossible.'[22] In the United Kingdom the medical community is now refusing to support this practice. However, that does not appear to deter expatriate Indians, who simply fly into India for their abortions.[23]

13. India today has laws to counter female foeticide, dowry, and dowry 'deaths.' However, the misogyny that promotes the objectification of women, treating them like usable and disposable objects, has such deeply pervasive cultural and historical roots, that it sometimes seems impossible to surmount. It permeates every corner of society. Laws pertaining to prenatal diagnosis of gender are widely flouted. Thousands of doctors, ultrasound and abortion clinics routinely cater to the female killing fields.[24] Police and courts are corruption-riddled and bureaucratic— so much so that most cases that may be dowry-related homicides go unregistered and uninvestigated, and are passed off as 'suicides' or 'accidents.' In the state of Kerala, police assigned to keep tabs on the safety and upbringing of girls delivered in hospitals, regard it as an opportunity for some extra income, and extract bribe money from parents who have killed their infant daughters.[25]

14. Perhaps the real danger is the rank apathy of the Indian nation to its own predicament. India is not even attempting to pull itself out of this horrendously annihilating abyss. In 2008, the U.N. announced, the number of 'missing' women in India had climbed to 62 million.[26] What this means in terms of India's social reality is that there are at least 62 million males without hope of ever finding female partners from within their own cultural setting. The possibility of social mayhem under such conditions is terrifying — and what it would involve could lead to widespread sexual crimes, perversion, and near anarchical law-and-order situations. Already, there is massive trafficking of girls across state boundaries in India, to be sold as 'brides' in those regions where the gender ratio has dropped so low that men cannot find women to marry. Families with many sons, who cannot afford to 'buy' a bride for each, often will buy a 'bride' for all the men to share.[27] Where every other social crisis that India currently faces—poverty, the nuclear standoff, the HIV/AIDs epidemic, and population explosion—could, under the most optimistic situations be somewhat dealt with, there is no solution to India's gender-ratio skewing. The warping of the natural gender ratio is irreversible.

15. Nonetheless, the signal is clear. India must pull out all its emergency stops to deal with this gender crisis right away. To get the ball rolling, I turned to the Rotary audience I was addressing and pleaded:


Intersections: Female Genocide in India and the 50 Million Missing Campaign

[Tahloube]

CR,

In the UAE, English language publications look as if they were from India due to the large number of Indian expats. I remember first reading about this problem when I was like 15 years old in one such publication. It was shocking to me, to say the least. The journalist interviewed people who confessed to burying alive as many as 8 female infants. Hindu tradition goes like if you bury 3 (? Don't remember exactly how many) daughters in cow litter, you get a son, or so believed a mother who buried twice as many with no son yet. The report also mentions such practices are carried out in some rural areas of China, too.

I was thinking to myself, regardless if one believes Mohammed صلى الله عليه وسلم was a prophet and messenger of God or not, he at least should be given due respect to putting an end to this heinous practice in his community and in a short time. Arabs were and still are influenced by Indian culture to some degree. If it weren't for Mohammad صلى الله عليه وسلم , we'd be having a similar problem in the Arab World or at least in Arabia.

As post #5 says:

In 2008, the U.N. announced, the number of 'missing' women in India had climbed to 62 millionThe possibility of social mayhem under such conditions is terrifying — and what it would involve could lead to widespread sexual crimes, perversion, and near anarchical law-and-order situations. Already, there is massive trafficking of girls across state boundaries in India, to be sold as 'brides' in those regions where the gender ratio has dropped so low that men cannot find women to marry. Families with many sons, who cannot afford to 'buy' a bride for each, often will buy a 'bride' for all the men to share...

This causes more problems to a percentage of females who survive. Being sold to multiple grooms (that alone is enough) and having to bear all household and farm work and then multiple abortions .... It's just too much to bear, physically and emotionally.

It's sad how this terrifying phenomenon is ignored by women rights groups while a woman wearing niqab/burqa calls for their crocodile tears.

[Botnst]

Makes you wonder why these stupid backward religions force women to subservience.

[Punjabi]

Originally Posted by Botnst

Makes you wonder why these stupid backward religions force women to subservience.

heh, heh......trying to wonder but no luck! heh, heh......which religions might these be? heh, heh........

[Cancer_Researcher]

Originally Posted by Tahloube

CR,

In the UAE, English language publications look as if they were from India due to the large number of Indian expats. I remember first reading about this problem when I was like 15 years old in one such publication. It was shocking to me, to say the least. The journalist interviewed people who confessed to burying alive as many as 8 female infants. Hindu tradition goes like if you bury 3 (? Don't remember exactly how many) daughters in cow litter, you get a son, or so believed a mother who buried twice as many with no son yet. The report also mentions such practices are carried out in some rural areas of China, too.

I was thinking to myself, regardless if one believes Mohammed صلى الله عليه وسلم was a prophet and messenger of God or not, he at least should be given due respect to putting an end to this heinous practice in his community and in a short time. Arabs were and still are influenced by Indian culture to some degree. If it weren't for Mohammad صلى الله عليه وسلم , we'd be having a similar problem in the Arab World or at least in Arabia.

As post #5 says:



This causes more problems to a percentage of females who survive. Being sold to multiple grooms (that alone is enough) and having to bear all household and farm work and then multiple abortions .... It's just too much to bear, physically and emotionally.

It's sad how this terrifying phenomenon is ignored by women rights groups while a woman wearing niqab/burqa calls for their crocodile tears.

[Botnst]

The ones that force women into subservience. You know, like honor killings, burning-up women whose family fail to make dowry payments, etc. It's fup ducked.