Girls 03

Let's save a girl child and stand against the genocide that is taking place in the society. Feticide is the most dastardly form of violence against women. Since the technology for sex determination first came into being, sex selective abortion has unleashed a saga of horror in India. In fact nature intended the womb to be a safe space place for nurturing and grooming the foetus before the child could take birth. But today, doctors have made it the most unsafe space for the female child by unleashing the terror of feticide. Today a girl child is several times more likely to be eliminated before birth in India than die of various causes in the first year of her existence.

Although foetal sex determination and sex selection is a criminal offence in India, the practice is rampant. Private clinics with ultrasound machines and other latest technologies are doing brisk business. Everywhere, people are paying to know the sex of an unborn child and paying more to abort the female child. The technology has even reached remote areas of the country through facilities like mobile clinics. People are getting sex determination done even for the first child.

Earlier when the technology was not available to know the sex of the foetus, the girl child used to be killed by putting a sand bag on her face or strangulating her or some poison used to be applied on the breasts of the mother. The irony was that neither mothers nor their family members used to express any kind of sorrow on the deaths of their baby daughters. Now the scenario has changed. With the help of new technologies one can easily detect the sex of the foetus. So the practice of female infanticide has been replaced by female feticide.

Female feticide and infanticide is not the only issues with a girl child in India. Actually at every stage of life she is discriminated and neglected for basic nutrition, education and living standard. When she is in the womb, she is eliminated before she can enter the world. If by chance she takes birth then at the time of birth her relatives pull her back and wrung her neck and after killing her she is thrown into a trash can. If she gets lucky to survive the early feticide and infanticide then her childhood is not more than a punishment with her brother getting all the attention with new shoes, dresses and books to learn while she is gifted a broom, a wiper and lots of tears. In her teenage, she misses nutritious food to eat and gets only the left over crumbs. During the age when she should be in college she is hurriedly "married off" leading to conditions where she remains ever dependent on others for her survival. She does not have either social or economic independence. Further her illiteracy, lack of education results in unwanted and early pregnancies, high fertility rate. This further aggravates the overall condition of females in the country. Again if this female gives birth to a girl child, the whole journey cycle of murder and discrimination begins all over again.

As per some studies the industry of ultrasound and sonography, sex-selection and female feticide is around 500 crores in India and this is run through small clinics, midwives, unregistered doctors and big hospitals. They conduct the abortions very secretly and many a times they become the reason for the death of many women. Many Doctors are involved in this widespread malpractice to make easy money. Actually it is a very profitable business. The machines have become cheaper, so even a new medical graduate can quickly set up a business. It may be illegal but it's very rare that in India medical council debars anyone for ethical malpractice.

It is high time that now Doctors are made responsible and accountable. In fact they are the ones who had aggressively promoted the misuse of technology and legitimized feticide. They created a weapon of mass destruction. Worst of worst some Doctors feel that they are doing a great social service and feel happy to provide this service to parents desperate to have a son, in the belief that they are preventing the birth of an unwanted child.

Today when the laws are getting stricter the method of revealing the sex is becoming more oblique. Now either the doctor will hand out blue or pink candy to the family members as they leave or make a remark during the examination by saying something like "Your child will be a fighter" or "The baby is like a doll." It is a clear fact that since the implementation of the legislation has taken place, the business has gone underground. The proof is the ever increasing number of feticide around the country especially in north India.

Now the Doctors who disclose the sex expect an under-the-table fee for breaking the law, ranging from a few hundred rupees in poorer areas to several thousand in more prosperous regions. The plain and simple truth is that the medical fraternity has not been sufficiently regulated in India and there is no sufficient deterrent or awareness even among the medical fraternity which can prevent these malpractices from taking place in the first instance.

Let's now look at the figures which speak the truth for itself. According to the last official census figures, India with its nationwide ratio of 933 women for 1,000 men had a deficit of 35 million women when it entered the new millennium. Experts are calling it "sanitised barbarism". UN figures tell that about 750,000 girls are aborted every year in India. It as genocide: "More than 6 million killed in 20 years. That's the number of Jews killed in the Holocaust."

Demographic trends indicate India is fast heading towards a million female fetuses aborted each year. In India, if the 1991 Census showed that two districts had a child sex ratio (number of girls per thousand boys) less than 850; by 2001 it were 51 districts. The irony is that the nation of so called goddess and mothers still follows a culture where people idolize the birth of son and mourn the birth of daughters.