A new study published in the medical journal The Lancet (subscription required) exposes the staggering numbers involved in India’s greatest shame. The BBC reports:
More than 10m female births may have been lost to abortion and sex selection in the past 20 years, according to research in The Lancet medical journal.Researchers in India and Canada said prenatal selection and selective abortion was causing the loss of 500,000 girls a year.
Their research was based on a national survey of 1.1m households in 1998.
The researchers said the “girl deficit” was more common among educated women but did not vary according to religion.In most countries, women slightly outnumber men, but separate research for the year 2001 showed that for every 1,000 male babies born in India, there were just 933 girls. [Link]
The one result of the study which really makes me lose hope for the future is that a more educated woman is even MORE likely to pursue sex selection by abortion (although this could be due to pressure from their equally more educated spouse). Also, there is an even larger spike in people selecting the sex of their babies through abortion if there has already been a daughter born into a family.
In cases where the preceding child was a girl, the ratio of girls to boys in the next birth was 759 to 1,000.This fell even further when the two preceding children were both girls. Then the ratio for the third child born was just 719 girls to 1,000 boys.
However, for a child following the birth of a male child, the gender ratio was roughly equal.
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p>Basically this means that for a female fetus to see the light of day she has to hope that she has an older brother waiting on the other side for her.
Dr [Shirish] Sheth says: “Female infanticide of the past is refined and honed to a fine skill in this modern guise. It is ushered in earlier, more in urban areas and by the more educated … A careful demographic analysis of actual and expected sex ratios shows that about 100 million girls are missing from the world – they are dead…” [Link]
Accounts such as these make me both terribly sad and angry. Especially coming from a culture that revers goddesses as divine power and ‘shakti’. It’s sick that educated people think like this too. Don’t they realize that in this day age, neither your son nor your daughter is going to stay with you, so why give such a big hoot about what sex your first born is.It is tragic that cultures across the world still consider females second class citizens and end their lives even before they begin. Argh!!!
This is such a sore thorn on the side of India that keeps seeing the light of day. The term “educated” is very misleading. When you compare the lower middle class with access to an “abortion” and prenatal care you are bound to find people with some level of education. Education does not make a 5000 year old culture go away. I still battle demons of my culture and family pressure 20 years out of India in the west so you can imagine what it is like in India.
Also the “educated” are compared to the vast majority of “illiterate” in India who may not always have access to an abortion but rather will kill a girl baby after it’s born or is the group with the high mortality rate among girl children in the first 5 years of their lives because of neglect.
My mother who is an ob/gyn and practiced medicine in India for some 20 years informs me that sex determination is illegal in India though doctors will do it for $$. It’s a dirty business. Also she informs me that the number of doctors performing sex selective abortions drops considerably as you get into the upper middle class. It’s the doctors catering to the lower middle class who aren’t that well to do themselves and are in more rural areas that have a higher tendency towards this kind of practice.
It is also common knowledge that there is a renegade unspoken group of doctors all thru India who actually sever the fallopean tubes so that a woman can no longer conceive in cases where she has gone thru too many abortions or has had too many girls already in hopes of a boy. These are the same doctors that will force the couple to get the man tested after the couples can no longer conceive and inform the man that he’s shooting blanks. Absolutely unethical though you can debate that.
Of course this isn’t scientific proof, just her experience.
The only thing I keep thinking when I read things like this is that at some point it has to change. A ‘male-heavy’ society will have to start evaluating its complicity when there are no marriageable women. I worry though that it won’t lead to a re-valuing of women but rather will lead to different mechanisms for finding wives (forced marriages, kidnapping, etc.) instead.
My cultural background is matrilineal though certainly arguably not matriarchal or above sexism. Nevertheless, I truly think girls are valued. Primacy is placed on education for both genders, and there is no real incentive to kill your girl babies when they are the ones through whom property is passed down, and with whom you live when you are old. Advocating for that sort of structural change may not be possible in most Indian cultures, but even replacing it with the Western one of financially planning for retirement 😉 might be a better option.
Nux2: Just curious, but where are you from? Your culture sounds really interesting.
This really is quite sad though. I suppose this also ties into this odd turning point in Indian history, where modernisation is more at odds with tradition than ever before. Though in this case, instead of being at odds with each other, modern technology and Indian culture come together to create a monster twice as terrifying. I guess now parents would be considered as murderous for killing a baby before birth as opposed to after it. Though, I could be wrong.
True. But is a culture with a more egalitarian sex-ratio in the murders of baby fetuses really much better ?
I wish I could remember the documentary I saw a few months ago that was based on this very subject. Men in a remote village in UP were concerned with this problem when the male population outnumbered the female count by over 50%. One of the villages ‘Panchayat’ elders was very vocal about the female infanticide etc. He said that feudal and caste quarrels didn’t help much either because men from village A couldn’t marry women from village B or C and so on. I believe it was on the Discovery Channel.
I was surfing the net on this subject and this article breaks down the ‘demographic black hole’ numbers by state.
“Don’t they realize that in this day age, neither your son nor your daughter is going to stay with you, so why give such a big hoot about what sex your first born is.”
actually, in this “day and age” especially in the middle class, the children do stay with their parents, and the men are entitled to all the property and a stake in the business while the girls are married away. even in this “day and age”, my extreme upper class marwari friend is constantly told by her grandmother “your days as a member of this household are numbered, girls are born to be given away”.
the most insidious practice that i have come across is the following.
a couple goes to get the ultrasound done, the doctor is bound by law not to reveal the baby’s gender, so instead as they are leaving he uses the following tactic…
when saying goodbye if the baby is a boy the doctor will say, “Jai Shri Krishna”, and if the baby is a girl he will say, “Jai Mata Di” ….
These murders are evil, period. But we hear more about female fetuses being aborted then male one. I know of educated people who still resort to gimmicks to choose the gender of their kids.
Theresa,
I guess I should have added that I personally don’t know of anyone in my generation, whether male or female, who lives with parents after having finished college and especially after marriage. More often that not, work, school and indeed life takes people around and away from home. The only time that I have seen parents come back and live with their kids is when they are very old and perhaps ill. And when that happens, they don’t care whether it is the daughter or the son who assists them.
I used to get the same kind of lectures that your upper class Marwari friend is getting from her grandmother about girls being ‘guests’ etc. My granny’s favourite chauvinistic comment is ‘True progress in the world only sees the light of the day when the man is on top’. Interestingly, not a lot of her grandchildren, me include believe this. Does your friend believe humbug such as this?
I apologize if I sound like I am hogging these posts…this issue really gets me incensed..:-)
I suppose, India should re-discover its matrilinear past(which I think existed). Malayalis(not only Nairs) and few Tuluvas(Aishwarya Rai belongs to this linguistic group) have been traditionally matrilineal. Unfortunately, this tradition is losing out due to high migration of these people. Well, there are people like my wife, who wants only one girl child so that she can give her name to her, the vast majority is turning patrilineal. I suppose, it’s showing in the declining sex ratio for girls between 1-6 years olds in Kerala. Though I don’t consider Kerala is the shining example of equality of the sexes(that depends mostly on the attitude of males), the empowerment of Malayali women is greater because of its traditional social rules which somehow went right on few issues.
Abhi,
Sure, there are no two opinions about the harmful and inhuman effect of female infanticide that is practised primarily in India and China. However, there are few things I want to point out if we really want to discuss the problem with some justice:
1) Lancet as a journal has a doubtful reputation, but then Science had a shaky last few weeks too (South Korea, cloning). Their Iraq casaulties are very much under dispute. The article about mad cow disease and Ganges river was firmly disputed by Nature. This said, your topic is important and maybe, using Lancet does not matter. Maybe, the study presented here is on the mark, I do not know. Maybe, you just want to raise an important issue.
2) I was reading the comments – None of seem to keep in mind that still 80% of India still resides in villages, live as extended families, a third of them fully illiterate, still quite poor with no social security in place – therefore, upper class marwari anecdotes, my grandmother examples have no statistical significance (anything more than small talk) in a serions discussion. Talking of western-style social security scheme is not an option right now, maybe 20 years from now. Majority of 20% of the ones who are in urban are still not part of “India Sninning” yet. Therefore, any discussion should accurate demographics in mind.
3) There is also a larger issue at hand – how does a country like India can regulate (some semblance regarding of law enforcement regarding) abortion (male or female) – where majority of them are done without any physician – they are done in most inhuman way, illegally. Issue of abortion in USA and in India are different ball games. How does one enforce such laws in India?
4) I love “Starbucks” intellectuals as anyone else but a problem like this gets solved by empowering organizations like SEWA which are giving micro-credit to women, giving incredible opportunities to women in India. Maybe, off-sourcing business has been a start in such a direction too. There are people like Ella Bhat who should be recognized and really helped by all of us in ways we – Are we really doing that? Just talking aimlessly………..
It’s hard to ignore that Kerala is the leader in women’s progression in the entire country. A higher rate of literacy for women, lower mortality rates for girl children, and a more healthier male to female ratio as compared to the rest of India. They are definitely doing something right and the government should use the example to model an approach for the rest of India.
India, indeed is a land of contrasts. All this in a country which a little more than thirty years ago had a woman prime minister take charge for several years to come. As progressive as America is, it’s only now that she is warming up to the idea of a female president. Even today a foreign born woman is India’s most powerful person!
Clickable Sex Ratio Map of India
Also as families start planning smaller families, son preference gets amplified.
theresa,
i wanted to tell you that through your sepia mutiny comments in past – i gather you are doing some very important work in inda.
keep in up……….we salute you efforts.
as kenyandesi pointed out, the above problem might more pronounced when families becomes smaller in India, like it happened in China.
I am an Indian urban woman pregnant with my first child. My instinct tells me its going to be a girl, in India sex-determination is banned. Reason being women normally abort female babies, thinking them to be a liability. It is common even among the middle-class women.
Women are often coerced by other women and family to abort/abandon if it is a girl. Feminity and the birth of it is an issue not many people understand, especially to Indians all strata included. Money, Men and More Money is the mantra in society that fights to ensure survival.
Look at adoption, in India mostly it is only girls babies up for adoption. Well all statistics are available, but is is deplorable that India still doesn’t trust its BABY GIRL power.
There is this movie called Matrubhoomi – a nationw ithout women which talks about the future where women are in the minority ans subjected to even more torture.
And I thought if there were more men, I could marry two of them.
just off to work, but wanted to throw a few things in there…
yes, india is still in the villages, not the cities… and really, even those in the cities are not often affected by the “winds of change” that go through the upper classes. i was present at a delivery a few months ago in a village in madhya pradesh, the baby was a boy and the woman started crying, i asked her why, and she said, “i am allowed to go home now”… turns out if the baby was a girl she would have been without a husband, in-laws, everything… they told her, “if it’s a girl don’t come back”.
ya, SEWA is good, but ella bhat has been embroiled in some controversy that it is important to recognize. i work with a very small organization called Beti in Lucknow. we provide health and education support to girls in villages of UP. as indicated by the name we focus on girl-children in our advocacy and action efforts — the work we’ve done has revealed the other reality of male-child preference. namely, that girls are born yes, and many of them get to stay alive, but they don’t get to go to school, they are often sold off in their teenage years, trafficked to various cities (oddly enough, benares is a big destination for trafficked girls), or generally just “disapear” before they turn 20.
i think anyone who has been to places in rural punjab, anywhere in up, bihar, etc. can attest to the fact that there are simply no girls around — you just don’t see them whether on the streets, in restaraunts, just anywhere… they are missing.
talking aimlessly has its purpose but yes — the next step is action. there is a whole heap of work to do…
kush: thanks for the praise — although i am a small fish in a big pond 🙂
biologically oriented might find the trivers-willard hypothesis of interest. also, empirical data relating to mating systems.
I’ve not seen Matrubhoomi, but I suppose reality is not too far from this futuristic doomsday prediction. When the last census results were revealed, the boy:girl ratio in some upper-class, well ‘educated’, rich societies in Haryana and Punjab was found to be as much as 4:3. ie: imagine every fourth boy not having a female partner for him. This BBC report gives some more info: ..”I couldn’t find a local girl,” said Chandram, who purchased a wife last year from Bangladesh. “So I had to go outside to get married. But it wasn’t cheap…”
So even if we discount these reports of bride-buying as one-off cases, but a precedent is set. If this trend continues, pretty soon we will have market rates set for brides with prices varying by caste. Come to think of it, this is opposite of dowry death scenario, where guys are up for sale(though not at the same level). India is indeed diverse as hell. It becomes difficult to make sense of such issues. Sometimes I wish, we were a bit less diverse.
(ps: I put ‘educated’ in quotes, because I think in many of these discussions we equate literacy with education and they mean two different things)
Razib said:
Yes, I too was thinking of Trivers-Willard while writing the post. It also reminds me of Jeff Goldblum’s character in Jurassic Park who chides the owner that even though all the dinosaurs at Jurassic Park are female, “life will find a way” to balance it out so as to provide offspring.
Kush said:
When I worked in India I was also involved in a micro-credit program for women in the Delhi slums but a lot of those women got beaten if they made more money than the men (who would use their profits to get drunk). Still it was a good idea and was seeing some success.
Cecilia said:
There was an article about just this type of scenario a couple of months ago. In a village in Punjab several men were sharing one woman as a way to get past the shortage in women caused by abortion.
ok, this just in (via Uma). British Medical Journal says “The sex ratio of children born at the hospital rose from 107 boys/100 girls in 1982 to 132 boys/100 girls in 1993….. ….Fetal sex determination was common, especially if the family already had daughters. Sex determination seems to be driven by a desire to have sons, with socioeconomic status and education having little effect.”
Generally, dowry system is rampant among landed castes(upper is POV, dominant would be better). Female infanticide is generally attributed to this factor. Therefore, education is irrelevent in this case without a structural change in the social practices. Traditional community feeling instead of individualism is proving any drastic change in the society almost impossible at present.
However, typical with communities, the Jatt Panchayats(village committees) in many villages in Haryana have passed diktat against dowry. At least, people are aware of the problem.
As a passing thought, it’s not a great surprise if it’s rich classes that are the traditional practitioners of dowry system. I suppose, dowry system could have been started by the rich since it hardly affects them. Otherwise, not only females even males are equal victims of this practice. I suppose, this practice was started by rich landed castes in the past which spread to other castes (so-called upper and lower) over time. Perhaps, you can gauge this phenomenon by the opinions given by the females belonging to various communities in India. In Southern Indian state Andhra Pradesh, the Reddy(a landed caste) girls were ‘cool’ to dowry according to a survey conducted by “The Times of India” sometimes ago.
Kush
As a Lancet subscriber – I would not say their rep is questionable, but the editor likes to court controversy. The Iraq debaccle and the Lancet’s remarks about homeopathy being bunk were two big issues that I covered in my newspaper last year. But there’s a difference between editorials and papers. The Iraq study was the only thing that has some questionable data. Everything else they run is sound. This was a Canadian-Indian study which wasn’t initially due for The Lancet.
Epoch
I’m assuming you’re referring to abortion in general. Your opinion is your own and I won’t get into that debate, but it’s the numbers that set India and a country like America apart. You’re saying that in America both sexes are aborted. But the proportion of pregancies aborted is far smaller. Obviously India’s population is a few times bigger, but normalising for that the number of abortions is lower. And almost no abortions in the West are performed on the basis of gender.
However, screening out X chromosome-carrying sperm may soon become commonplace. This circumvents a lot of people’s qualms about abortion and I’d predict if it goes on unregulated (like much of America’s health system) you may find ratios altering outside countries as backward as India or China.
I think this is going to cause a big problem a few decades down the line. One reason why the sex imbalance hasn’t created huge problems in the marriage system is that with a growing population and a tradition of older males marrying younger females there is a rough equality of marriageable men and women.
For example if the population grows at about 2% and if men are on average 5 years older than their wives then even if there are 10% more men at any given age the number of men will roughly equal the number of women about five years younger. So there will be enough 20 year old women for 25 year old men.
However as the rate of population growth slows down (which is happening and a good thing)it will be increasingly difficult for men to find wives. So if the population rate growth is 1% the number of 25 year old men will be greater than 20 year old women and the men will have to wait. Once population growth is zero there will be a permanent surplus of men who won’t find wives and this can potentially cause huge social problem.
Before you let this study reinforce your western cultural prejudices….
Recent research has shown that there might be another explanation for the deficit in the female population:
The Search for 100 Million Missing Women
“…researchers had found that a pregnant woman with hepatitis B is far more likely to have a baby boy than a baby girl. It wasn’t clear why—it may be that a female fetus is more likely to be miscarried when exposed to the virus.” ….
“She measured the incidence of hepatitis B in the populations of China, India, Pakistan, Egypt, Bangladesh, and other countries where mothers gave birth to an unnaturally high number of boys. Sure enough, the regions with the most hepatitis B were the regions with the most “missing” women.”
According to the Slate article: “Her discovery hardly means that Sen was wrong to cry misogyny, at least in some parts of the world: While Oster found, for instance, that Hepatitis B can account for roughly 75 percent of the missing women in China, it can account for less than 20 percent of the boy-girl gap in Sen’s native India. The culprits behind the disappearance of the 50 million women whom Oster did not find are likely the horrible ones that Sen and others have suggested.”
So apparently Hepatitis B isn’t the major cause for the sex-imbalance in India.
Dissent, the quality of that research is astonishingly low. It’s nothing more than bogus science like the propaganda studies published attributing Punjab’s sex imbalance to natural disasters. It’s poppycock.
The Jha study, the entirety of which I have read, is sound. Sen’s initial research and the Oster paper you cite are both by economists who seem to pluck figures from the air. The Greenland and Greek studies that Oster referred to a little more than anecdotal evidence garnered from a handful of women. As I’m sure you know, the key to any reliable clinical study is size. The bigger the sample size, the better. Jha’s study studied 134,000 births.
Oster herself admitted that her Hep B theory explains less than 20% of the imbalance in India and Pakistan. China is the only one with any sort of (non-causal) link. What has happened is she has erroneously linked two incidental findings. I’ll do it too: China has more men than women. Chinese people have black hair. Black hair must cause male births. It’s faulty science.
She also concedes that as Hep B vaccines are almost universal in China and India the ratio should not have been so skewed as of today – but it is. Hence disproving her own hypothesis.
It’s mumbo jumbo by someone who really doesn’t understand what she’s writing about.
I have a little controversial take on this issue. I think market forces are going to take care of the issue of female infanticide. I am serious when I say that, because I believe that the reason, boys are preferred are twofold. (See, Vinod !! I was telling the truth when I said, I am a believer in market force)
1). Lack of social security (for old age) and a boy is supposed to be able to care for parents when they are old. 2). Dowry. Boy is money in where as girl is money out.
The reason I say that market will take care of the HORRIFIC practice, is that increasingly its becoming more expensive for middle class people to have boys. The reason is that parents are supposed to “educate” the boy and spend a lot of money, then provide for housing (which is becoming more and more expensive). These things at one point will make it no longer “profitable” (or “economically desirable”, sorry for both dis-tasteful characterization) to have a boy child. Thus stopping the INHUMANE practice of female infanticide.
RC,
Taking a Devil’s Advocate view, one could subsequently state that a possible outcome would be parents aborting male babies as well as females, rather than just focusing on the girls. The pendulum could swing in the other direction (or both directions, if you understand my analogy).
Anyway…..
I think that, once awareness of the gender imbalance becomes sufficiently widespread back in India, one potential outcome is that people will resort to increasingly-extreme (and possibly morally-dubious) methods to deal with it. A consistent problem in some quarters of desi culture is an unwillingness to admit to one’s own mistakes and logically/ethically-flawed reasoning, and to subsequently take “ends justifying the means” actions to deal with the fall-out from attitudes and behaviours which were highly misguided in the first place — instead of addressing and changing the “root cause” attitudes and practices.
…and…give rise to…male..infanticide…????
My second paragraph wasn’t related to the first one; the first part was specifically in response to RC’s message.
The rest of my post was just a few thoughts on this issue in general, based on some views a number of commenters had expressed on this thread previously.
Thats why I said, my position is controversial. The crux of my position is that female infanticide is a perversion based on economic situation. (I am open to arguments that prove me wrong). So, the solution is economic as well. When the pendulum swings the other way, it will bring a different set of socio-economic reality (according to my argument). If I comment about it, it will be just speculation.
RC,
Having a boy and turning him into a ‘good investment’ that would eventually bring a ‘huge return’ has always been the case irrespective of how much it has cost the parents. Inflation and the prospects of spending more has only been offset by the concept of the “NRI” cashcow. That phenomenon has become even more prevalant in the past decade and a half. The “NRI” tag still has the potential to get maximum $$$ and also has given rise to the phenomenon of a “honeymoon wedding” where NRI boys are going back to their respective villages marrying and having a good time with women only to never follow thru and take them back with them overseas.
I’d like to see the 3+ / woman birth rate in India go down period. Not swing the abortions the other way. That would be more ideal no? Because only when the population is under some control and there is lesser strain on the existing resources which might bring more education and dare I say “westernization” to the country will women become more desirable???
A huge peeve for me is the media/entertainment in India. Where very other TV soap opera is about the bitchy MIL or the ever suffering DIL why the hell isn’t anyone making programming that addresses this issue to brainwash the general junta into the right direction?????
Actually – I’ve just thought of another reason that Oster’s research is bunk – if the first born is a son, the second and third born have a normal chance of being female. That would be impossible if Hep B was to blame. But seeing as she more or less accepts it’s not the cause, I fail to see the purpose of her article/study.
I have had not one but 2 abortions with a kind, female doctor in an immaculate Delhi clinic. My ex husband, whom I married for love, turned out to be severely alcoholic, with all its related abuse/trauma. These abortions were what enabled me to get on with my life, educate myself and provide for my wonderful first child. Yes, we left my husband. I am fully in support of abortion being freely available. You marry with love and hope and if you cannot provide a kind,loving home and a future to a child, it is far better and humane to abort than weep over horrid child abuse tales daily in the US press. All of you should understand that a woman or a couple resort to an abortion when they are NOT able to look after a child for whatever reasons. This is a last resort desperate action, they do not need your criticism as well.
As for doctors tying up fallopian tubes of really poor women with many, many abortions or in terrible health, what would you do? Pontificate without any compassion? Compassion is not always sanctioned by law or the Pope. Women or men are kidnapped when they are weak, not because there are fewer of them. Japan’s economic miracle was attributed to freely available abortion, post war.
In Maharashtra, the govt has instituted a lot of pro-girl child measures which actually make having a female child much smarter. Girls have free education up to grade 12, reserved seats in most professional colleges, they even pay taxes at a lesser rate than men (up to a certain level, I forget the exact limit).And yes, they even have reserved seats in the Parliament. A lot of these laws are on paper….someday they will translate into real benefits.
Untouchable said:
Thank you for sharing your personal story. I think however, that you may have misunderstood this issue. Neither the study in The Lancet nor this post is judging whether abortion is morally right or wrong. That is an entirely different debate with passioate and personal views on both sides, and an issue that has a lot of relevance right now in the U.S. THIS debate is whether or not sex selection of the unborn through abortion is right or wrong. I cannot even imagine someone trying to find a moral or logical defense of this practice. I just don’t see that there can be one.
No one is advocating a ban on abortions. No one believes that abortion should not be freely/openly available to those that seek it. Your situation with all due respect is very different from the situation we are referring to. This isn’t an abortion issue as much as it is a social/cultural issues that needs to be addressed. People have to be taught to have fewer children and accept whatever sex the child may be. That is a larger issue than getting people to stop having abortions. The morality issue isn’t attached to the abortion itself but rather to the sex selection.
The female infanticide is prevelant is educated middle class population. So they are already educated. I dont understand how more education will help this group.
By education I don’t mean learning about sciences and math and geography. I meant more in terms of a reform towards social education and attitudes towards women. Government programs address AIDS, family planning and all kinds of other issues. Why can this not be one of those issues where “education” or awareness is brought about by the government concentrating on it?
“Government programs address AIDS, family planning and all kinds of other issues. Why can this not be one of those issues where “education” or awareness is brought about by the government concentrating on it?”
Ms. Janet,
They (Indian Government) have been talking about female infanticide from since I can remember. They have been TV ads, newspaper articles, serious commentary. Walk into any hospital in India, you will see educational ads all over. One of the earliest article I read was from Illustrated Weekly of India way back when.
At Carl Sagan’s talk I remember him (paraphrased) saying, “Please do not think that people in developing countries do not know about harmful effects of unlimited population. It is that is their only social security in places with high mortality rates.” In a similar vien, cruel economic and social forces (that is why economics is the only cause) conspire toward female infanticide practices by normal human being put under bizarre conditions.
As somebody on this thread mentioned that Maharastra Government has incentives in place.
correction: that is why economics is not the only cause
If a parent cannot or will not look after a child, girl or boy, they should be permitted to abort. If a girl brings trauma to them, that is their call. Some abort if they cannot look after a baby, some because the child is handicapped or female or whatever. It is their call unless you are willing to take over the baby. And this business of a shortage of girls or boys is ridiculous. On lighter note, most women are managing with a shortage of reasonable men! By the way, baby girls are more in demand for adoptions today.
How so? You don’t see this becoming an issue in communities who continually do not bring girls into the family some 20 years down the line?
I think the only thing that I have managed to learn from your comments is that you are ridiculous.
Kush has it summed it up preety good above. Sometimes its hard for people to realize the difference of wealth gap (and Social security gap) there is between a typical western middle class person, compared to his/her Indian counterpart. This sometime is mis-represented as lack of morals on the poorer person’s part (or, represent as “lack of western values”)
A few points…
Since at least the 80’s the Indian government has spent hundreds of crores of rupees every year trying to prevent female-infanticide. Like all government programs everywhere, the return on investment has been negative, ie the problem has only grown bigger! In fact, the government posters discouraging this has actually ended up educating people about this possibility!! (“Arrey! I didn’t know that this technology existed!”)
This is a classic case of trying to solve a non-organised societal problem in an organised manner, especially when the demand is distributed and strong. Failure is certain, as pro-Prohibitioners realised in America.
This will grow worse. As you may know, it is the male (sperm) that determines the sex of the would-be baby. Right now, pre-natal tests + abortions cost a few hundred rupees. Sooner or later, somebody will come up with a five-rupee pill which a man can take to kill off all his sperm that could give give birth to females. If he refuses to take it, his parents will “slip” it into his morning cup of tea. Chances of female fetus will be ~0%. Pre-natal testers will demand a ban to the pill, but will fail because it’s cheaper and less invasive. The male-female sex ratio will hit 100-10. Abortions will be reduced drastically.
But then, something wonderful will happen. Life, as Abhi quoted Malcolm before, will find a way. Parents of girls will start demanding exhorbitant dowries from would be grooms. Girls will get their best pick of men. This has started happening now. A cousin sister of mine refused to marry any groom who had a mother! She held out for two years so she could go into a house with no MIL. Another relative of mine demanded that she would marry only a man who would come and live with her in her parents house. Girls will, and should, demand that the man change his last name to her’s. In fifty years or so, balance will be achieved and things will be back to normal.
Unfortunately, in the meantime there will be a lot of pain and suffering for many.
M. Nam
ROFLMAO omg I nearly fell off my chair. This was the funniest thing I’ve heard all day. Having been thru too many girlfriends/cousins woes with MILs I say more power to her. My mother has given me permission to go at her if she turns into a horrible MIL towards my brothers wife!!
To Hawkeye(27):
If 75% of the missing girls in China can be explained by Hep B, it is possible that it explains 75% of the missing girls in India as well. It is also possible that the female deficit in India may be explained by some other disease. It is a important clue which should be pursued further.
To BongBreaker(28):
Before you dismiss Osters work, have you actually read her paper or is your critique based on the slate.com article? You said: “What has happened is she has erroneously linked two incidental findings” and “I fail to see the purpose of her article/study.”
The purpose of her study is very clear: to see beyond the immediate explanation for the female deficit and uncover the true reasons for it. If you dont want to see the correlation between Hep B and skewed sex ratios, it is because you want to fit the facts to your pet theory.