India’s gender imbalance is widening its gap, and officials are placing blame on the practice of female infanticide and sex-selective abortions. Uma Girish writes in The Christian Science Monitor:
Though the government has battled the practice for decades, India’s gender imbalance has worsened in recent years. Any progress toward halting infanticide, it seems, has been offset by a rise in sex-selective abortions. Too many couples – aided by medical technology, unethical doctors, and weak enforcement of laws banning abortion on the basis of gender – are electing to end a pregnancy if the fetus is female.
The consequence of female infanticide and, more recently, abortion is India’s awkwardly skewed gender ratio, among the most imbalanced in the world. The ratio among children up to the age of 6 was 962 girls per 1,000 boys in 1981, but 20 years later the inequity was actually worse: 927 girls per 1,000 boys.
The Christian Science Monitor/Yahoo!: For India’s daughters, a dark birth day
“This happens only in the villages of Rajathan deserts” is a typical sentiment in India. It’s often “uncool” to accept the dirt of dowry, abuse and discrimination in personal environments. Outrage is almost always the feature of feminists, politicians, the very young and Maid Servant-Types. Really, women feel forced to produce sons to appease their in-laws, even in affluent urban contexts, especially Business Families which need Hands to run the business along generations, seamlessly. There are exceptions, evolutions-a small percentage or standard deviation still translates to a large number in India.
The author writes about “unethical doctors”. Interestingly enough, I saw a programme on an Indian TV channel that interviewed some doctors in and around Delhi. Quite a few of them stated that they drop subtle hints about the gender of the child to the expectant mothers during ultrasound checkups. Their rationale: far better to let the mother abort the child rather than the alternative – give birth to a daughter and have them both suffer at the hands of her in-laws.
The matter is rather grey and punitive judgments against doctors are not helpful in understanding the issue. It requires a far more complex process of education, laws and social change. Banning ultrasound gender-determination is a knee jerk reaction and therefore, unproductive.