Just finished reading
Shobhan Bantwal's "
The Forbidden Daughter" and I couldn't stop thinking about the menace of "aborting girls" which is, unfortunately, still gripping our society. The cultural preference for boys is skewing India's sex ratio. It is, indeed, an another form of gender violence against women.
Pre-natal sex determination test is illegal in India but that could not save up to 12 million girls (from 1980 - 2010) from not coming into this world. Every two hours in India, a woman dies of unsafe abortion but that did not affect the
620, 472 reported abortions in 2012. In such an abortion, not only foetus loses her life(can't call foetus "it", she is breathing already and is alive), mother's life is at high risk as well. Everyday around 2000 girls are killed in the womb or immediately after birth as told by India's Minister of Women and Child Welfare, Menaka Gandhi, though UN report says it is actually 7000 in number. This unethical sex determination and selective abortion of female infants is $224 million US industry in India. Ultrasounds and other sex-determining services have been readily available at cheaper rates these days and everyone can afford them.
Worst-Hit Areas
Sex-selective abortions are common at places where there is a patriarchal society. China, India, Pakistan, Korea, South East Europe are the common examples of the countries where cultural values prefer male over female children.
In Canada, I am surprised to find an article where Indian mothers are taking advantage of sex determination tests(totally legal in Canada) and are aborting their female infants. In India, the western states of Punjab, Haryana and Rajasthan have the most gender-skewed ratio.
In Punjab, I still couldn't get over the deadly news of an infant dumped in a garbage bin and was left for dogs to eat her. Her only crime was that she was a fourth girl born to her parents. Unfortunately, this evil is more prevalent in rich, educated and the urban bred. Chandigarh, the capital city of Punjab & Haryana, the city with the highest standard of living in the country, has 777 girls for 1000 boys.
In Haryana's Jind district, there has been such a scarcity of girls that men from this district have been travelling to poverty-ridden villages of Assam, West Bengal, Jharkhand, Bihar and Orissa to buy their brides. The skewed gender ratio is responsible for the system of bride buying and trafficking in which girls and young women are lured into marriage by promises of a happy and secure life. They have been reportedly exploited, denied basic rights, mistreated or abandoned sometimes.
According to unofficial estimates, nearly
2500 cases of female foeticide take place everyday in
Rajasthan. There have been reports of killing girl children overnight by poisoning them with opium, crushing them with stones and starving them. Some horrifying incidents of female infants being found buried in mud or in bushes have been reported as well. In 2012, there were 308 cases filed against female foeticide in Rajasthan which was the highest number in the country, no conviction has been reported till date for any of those cases.
Girls Are The Spirit Of Our Nation,Save Them And Stop Their Exploitation.
Why female foeticide?
We know that from ages, India has been justifying patriarchal values in which males have always been given more importance over females. Females have been perceived as social and economic burden. This age-old lame preference of boys to girls has, in fact, given birth to the rationale of killing females in the womb.
- Dowry: In India, the age-old dowry system, is an instigator to the unwanted female children. When a girl child is born, her parents start calculating the expense of her wedding and the money that will be given to the groom's family in cash or as a gift. Because of this, most of the parents do not want to see this day of tragedy when their savings of whole life will be given to the boy's family and even then there is no guarantee of their daughter's well-being at her in-laws.
- Male child living with parents: People in India need male children because male child is a better investment for them. He is going to live with them and will support them as long as they live. Unlike a girl child who once married off with huge dowry starts living with her new family, a male child stays with his parents and his wife brings dowry. Why would they choose something less beneficial to them economically?
- Far beyond equality: As a result of prevalent sexism in Indian society, girl children and women have been considered less powerful and successful. They have to fight hard to prove their mettle in a society where everything is by default served for men. Even though women have been very successful in every field but gender pay gap is yet another example of unconscious discrimination against women where they are always rated lower against men.
Solution
The social menace of gender inequality and gender violence leading to female foeticide can somehow be prevented by:
- Cancellation of doctor's licence who practices in determining the sex of an unborn child and thus performing the abortion. His/her licence should be permanently terminated so that he/she should know the ill effects of misusing the power of a health specialist whom people confide in for their treatments.
- Penalties for the parents who want to know the sex of their unborn child and thus aborting the female foetus. They should be tried in court for the same crime as killing a child when they abort an unborn child.
- Educating and spreading awareness amongst the parents to be about the ill effects of aborting female children and embracing the girl children same as their male counterparts.
To those whom I still couldn't convince that girls are no less than boys, they can check the academic results of all the State Boards as well as the Central Board of Education to see who excels them all mostly. Not only academically, those were the ladies who saved India's honour by bringing medals for the country in Olympics 2016. Need I say their names?
I still remember a glimpse from Satyamev Jayate, a television show which shed light on major social issues in India, in which a lady said that we are not fighting for this age-old patriarchal society to become a matriarchal one while advocating women's rights, all we need is equality.
The least we can do to give equal rights to our sister, mother, daughter or wife is to let her come into this world!
