Multi Faith Pilgrimage Of Compassion Against Female Foetecide
The 2001 census report of India came as a blot on face of the country in terms of a huge gap in the sex ratio i.e. 927 girls per thousand boys. India, a country where girls are being worshipped since time immemorial is facing serious crisis of vanishing girls. The census results have projected India as a hub of a cruel modern society, which has indulged in the most heinous and inhumane act called female feticide-the sex selective abortion of girls.
For many years, there have been reports of baby girls being deliberately killed at birth, either deliberately or through neglect, in India. Prof. Amartya Sen, a Nobel Prize laureate, calls them India’s “Missing Girls.”Female foeticide – the sex-selective abortion of girls – had already led to a gap estimated by the national census at about 25 million girls by 1990. The government of India reacted with alarm and introduced a law making it illegal to detect the sex of a child through ultrasound examinations. Yet by the 2001 census the figure rose to 35 million and experts fear that it may touch perhaps 50 million.
The root cause of female foeticide and infanticide remain, however, stemmed in societal attitudes and prejudices. In ancient India, birth of a girl child in the family was greeted, as the arrival of “Lakshmi”, the Hindu goddess of wealth. She was symbol of prosperity happiness and good luck.
Social scientists place so many reasons behind the problem like the patriarchal joint-family system, structure of property ownership, early marriage, somewhere self-immolation of widows (sati) or state of permanent widowhood and dowry system as major factors towards impediment of development of women. The conventional mindset has seen girls as a burden because they have to be protected and provided with large sums of money for wedding dowries (even though this practice is, at least in theory, also against the law). But this is the “modern” cultural preference for sons (who bring in income in the form of dowries) that began to seriously skew sex ratios in the country radically.
While going through disgracing and shocking results of sex ratio in Northern states we find that Punjab, the most prosperous state is on the top in eliminating girls in womb, having 793 girls per thousand boys followed by Haryana, another prosperous state 820, Delhi, the capital of the country 865, Gujarat the land of great saint and reformer Maharishi Dayananda Saraswati and Mahatma Gandhi, an apostle of non- violence, 878 and Rajasthan 909 the land of brave women who gave birth to Rajputs the symbol of valor and courage.
Haryana had the most depressive scenario as a result of misuse of these test. The current sex ratio in Haryana is 861 men for thousand women, the lowest among the major states in India. The techno-docs owning cars pay home visit to pregnant woman’s home for extraction of amniotic fluid and deliver the results in the next visit. As per the UNICEF study female foeticide has been the main cause of widening sex ratio in Haryana. According to the Hindu, 19-10-2001. “In the last six years, number of sex- selections has increased from 62000 to 69000 in Haryana and from 51000 to 57000 in Punjab. This reckless scale has pushed the fertility rate down from 3.2 to 2.9 in Haryana and from 2.9 to 2.2 in Punjab. “Reduction of birth rate, at what cost?
The below graphs give the picture of Declining Sex Ratio in India (1961-2001) and State Average Child Sex Ratio Declining 1991-2001, are shown below:
Another argument that prenatal diagnostic test give women a choice to select a child of desired sex is also unacceptable as women’s ‘Choices” are made within the patriarchal compulsion to produce son. Women are not taking decision autonomously. Threat of desertion, divorce and ill treatment force them to opt for sex-determination and sex pre-selection tests.
Similarly we experienced a slow declination of females in Northeastern though no dowry death was registered. The state of Meghalaya is known to have matriarchal society that empowers women in decision-making but the census table below shows the declination of girl child in the state. Most of the Northeastern states were said to belief for the equality of sex and women empowerment, but why six states out of eight is showing a rapid declination in sex ratio?
One of the main reasons for the decline in females is the growing availability of ultra-sound and other pre-natal screening techniques to all sectors of society, despite measures implemented to prevent the abuse of such techniques, is solely responsible for shocking rise in the number of “Missing Girls.” Even though pre-screening to determine gender is illegal in India, it is very evident that sex selection and abortion clinics are still widespread, (Since pre-natal scans to check for abnormalities is legal, it is very difficult to prove that an unscrupulous doctor may have used such a test to reveal a baby’s gender).