Aqsa

“One in three women worldwide has been beaten, coerced into sex, or abused in some other way, most often by someone she knows. One in four women were abused during pregnancy (Amnesty International; www.amnesty.org)”

I couldn’t find anything better than this to start off with an article on female feticide!

It won’t be shocking, if told that the very birth of a female child is considered a bad omen in countries like India!

This explains why we have sex ratios (females per thousand males) as high as…

World 986

1 China 944

2 India 933

3 U.S.A. 1,029

4 Indonesia 1,004

5 Brazil 1,025

6 Pakistan 938

7 Russian Fed. 1,140

8 Bangladesh 953

9 Japan 1,041

10 Nigeria 1,016

Source:World Population Prospects (mid year estimates) 1998, revision, Volume 2, Sex and Age, United Nations.

Despite the fact that, the number of live births of females compared to that of males is higher. If we go into the biological details, there’s a fifty-fifty chance that a boy or a girl will be born. But due to higher disease resistance or simply an extra “X� chromosome more girls are born compared to boys and that can clearly explain the higher sex ratios in developed countries.

“India now has the dubious distinction of being known as the country that likes to ensure that girls are never born. We are facing a national emergency, an `epidemic’ that will have far-reaching social consequences, says KALPANA SHARMA.”

No girls, please, we’re Indian: the Hindu.

“It’s shocking figures and we are in a national crisis if you ask me,”

“The minute the child is born and she opens her mouth to cry, they put sand into her mouth and her nostrils so she chokes and dies,” Chowdhury said, referring to cases in the western desert state of Rajasthan. “They bury infants into pots alive and bury the pots. They put tobacco into her mouth. They hang them upside down like a bunch of flowers to dry,” she said.

-Minister for Women and Child Development, Renuka Chowdhury.

Uncountable fetuses are aborted on a daily basis, here in India. Though it’s a crime to determine the sex of the child in pre natal stage, still abortion clinics are a big hit! None the less, those girls who survive are doomed to a life full of misery. Women who are mother to a boy enjoy a better social status than the women who have daughters.

They are cursed and blamed for adding an extra burden on the family. That’s why most women themselves consider the birth of a girl a bad omen… if not for the family, at least for themselves!

Here’s a story….just ONE!

“Lakshmi already had one daughter, so when she gave birth to a second girl, she killed her. For the three days of her second child’s short life, Lakshmi admits, she refused to nurse her. To silence the infant’s famished cries, the impoverished village woman squeezed the milky sap from an oleander shrub, mixed it with castor oil, and forced the poisonous potion down the newborn’s throat. The baby bled from the nose, then died soon afterward. Female neighbors buried her in a small hole near Lakshmi’s square thatched hut of sunbaked mud. They sympathized with Lakshmi, and in the same circumstances, some would probably have done what she did. For despite the risk of execution by hanging and about 16 months of a much-ballyhooed government scheme to assist families with daughters, in some hamlets of … Tamil Nadu, murdering girls is still sometimes believed to be a wiser course than raising them. “A daughter is always liabilities. How can I bring up a second?” Lakshmi, 28, answered firmly when asked by a visitor how she could have taken her own child’s life eight years ago. “Instead of her suffering the way I do, I thought it was better to get rid of her.” (All quotes from Dahlburg, “Where killing baby girls ‘is no big sin’.”)”

Shocking is such a small word to define what I felt after reading this.

“As John-Thor Dahlburg points out, “in rural India, the centuries-old practice of female infanticide can still be considered a wise course of action.” (Dahlburg, “Where killing baby girls ‘is no big sin’,” The Los Angeles Times [in The Toronto Star, February 28, 1994.]) According to census statistics, “From 972 females for every 1,000 males in 1901 … the gender imbalance has tilted to 929 females per 1,000 males. … In the nearly 300 poor hamlets of the Usilampatti area of Tamil Nadu [state], as many as 196 girls died under suspicious circumstances [in 1993] … Some were fed dry, unhulled rice that punctured their windpipes, or were made to swallow poisonous powdered fertilizer. Others were smothered with a wet towel, strangled or allowed to starve to death.”

ï‚· 2 million females are killed before or at birth simply because of their sex (www.indiafemalefoeticide.org)

 More than 60 million women are ‘missing’ from the world today as a result of sex-selective abortions and female infanticide (Amnesty; www.amnesty.org)

 50 million women are ‘missing’ from India (www.thp.org)

ï‚· In China, the 2000 census revealed the ratio of girls to boys is 100:199. The norm is 100:103 (chinadatacenter.org)

ï‚· Of 8,000 foetuses aborted in a Bombay clinic, 7999 were female (learningpartnership.org)

A UNICEF report released this week said 7,000 fewer girls are born in the country every day than the global average would suggest, largely because female foetuses are aborted after sex determination tests but also through murder of new borns.

According to the 2001 census, the national sex ratio was 933 girls to 1,000 boys, while in the worst-affected northern state of Punjab, it was 798 girls to 1,000 boys. The ratio has fallen since 1991, due to the availability of ultrasound sex-determination tests.

“Even today when you go to a temple, you are blessed with ‘May you have many sons’,” she said. “The minute you empower them to earn more or equal (to men), social prejudices vanish.“

The practice of killing the girl child is more prevalent among the educated, including in up market districts of New Delhi, making it more challenging for the government, the minister said. “How do we tell educated people that you must not do it? And these are people who would visit all the female deities and pray for strength but don’t hesitate to kill a girl child,” she said.

This entry was posted on Sunday, January 7th, 2007 at 9:21 am and is filed under being a woman, india. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.