April 22, 2001 NY Times

Abortion in India Is Tipping Scales Sharply Against Girls

By CELIA W. DUGGER

The number of girls per 1,000 boys dropped to 927 this year from 945 in 1991 and 962 in 1981.

AFFARPUR, India — Here in the northern state of Punjab, couples who abort their female fetuses are known as "kudi-maar" — or "daughter-killers." The local health worker who lives in this village, a kindly woman named Jaswinder Kaur, recently led the way through a maze of narrow lanes to the home of one such family.

Gurjit Kaur, 22, said she paid 500 rupees — about $11 — for an ultrasound test a year ago, then aborted her pregnancy after a doctor told her she was carrying a girl. Now her belly has swelled again, this time with the longed-for male child. Her plump face seemed radiant with well-being.

"Our elders wanted a boy," she explained. "Boys are important because they have to look after all the property."

Though India outlawed sex-determination tests in 1994, their use has become commonplace as ultrasound technology — which became available in cities during the 1980's — has spread to small towns served by itinerant doctors who carry the compact machines from clinic to clinic.

Early figures from the 2001 census, conducted in February and March, have made it clear that female fetuses are being regularly aborted, continuing a trend that first became marked in the 1980's. The number of girls per 1,000 boys dropped to 927 this year from 945 in 1991 and 962 in 1981.

The fall in the ratio of girls to boys over the past decade, when India's population grew by a staggering 181 million, has been most extreme in the richest states of the north and west, where more people can afford tests and abortions, demographers and economists say.

For example, here in Punjab, India's most prosperous farming state, the ratio of girls to boys has plummeted to 793 girls per 1,000 boys from 875, while in Gujarat, a leading industrial state, the figure for girls has fallen to 878 from 928.

A pronounced gender imbalance has long been a feature of life in India, especially in the north. India has the lowest ratio of females to males among the 10 most populous countries in the world. Neglect of the health and nutrition of girls and women and high rates of maternal death in childbirth helped give males a survival edge. Now ultrasound technology is giving the bias against girls added intensity.

The results — found not just in India, home to about one-sixth of humanity, but elsewhere in Asia, too, — are disturbing to many Indians, who fear the long-term social consequences and regret the injustice.

"India is catching up with other sexist, modern societies like South Korea and China in sex-selective abortions," said the Nobel Prize-winning economist Amartya Sen of Trinity College at Cambridge and a native of India. "It's a technological revolution of a reactionary kind."

Professor Sen, who has been writing about the tens of millions of "missing" women in Asia for a decade, noted that the startling deterioration of the sex ratios for children in China, India and South Korea has occurred even as overall sex ratios for females in those countries have modestly increased.

But longer life spans for women and rising literacy rates have not yet changed the strong cultural preference for sons, who will carry the family name, inherit ancestral property, care for parents in old age and light their fathers' funeral pyres.

A range of groups in India, including the Indian Medical Association, the high priests of the Sikh religion and nonprofit groups like the Voluntary Health Association, are campaigning against sex-selective abortions.

But enforcement of the 1994 law against sex-determination tests is weak. A. R. Nanda, a high-ranking civil servant in the central government's health ministry, said that as far as he knew no one in this nation of more than one billion people had ever been convicted of violating it. Nor is there any system for monitoring the sex of aborted fetuses.

In Punjab, Joginder Singh, the state's director of health services for family welfare, said the state prosecutes a case only if a woman complains that she was forced to have a test and abort a female fetus — and as far as he knows, no woman has ever made such a complaint.

"It's the ladies who have to come forward," Dr. Singh insisted.

But experts say women are unlikely to complain since they often want a boy as intensely as their husbands and fathers-in-law, or cannot resist the relentless pressure to have one from families they depend on for economic survival.

Here in a cluster of villages and towns in the Patiala district, the outlawed use of ultrasound tests to identify female fetuses and the illegal abortions that follow happen underground, but barely. In just 10 years, the number of girls per 1,000 boys has dropped by 101, to 770 — and none of the doctors, health workers or residents interviewed here had any doubt about why.

"It's because of the testing," said Amarjeet Chander, a veteran gynecologist who headed the government hospital in Dera Bassi, population 15,690, before starting her own 18-bed hospital there in 1990. "The machines are everywhere now."

Indeed, large signs advertising ultrasound tests are quite visible. In one small, jumbled shopping center in Dera Bassi, there were two such medical clinics. Radiologists from the city of Panchkula, 15 miles away, visit these clinics once a week, carrying their ultrasound machines.

Drs. Dinesh and Savita Mittal, a husband and wife team, run the City Hospital there and advertised on their sign board that Dr. Dev Batra provided ultrasound tests. But the Mittals became upset when asked about the use of ultrasound for sex determination. They said that the ultrasound machine was Dr. Batra's alone and that they had nothing to do with the testing.

Oddly, the morning after they were interviewed, the Mittals had painted over the sign advertising the tests, and Dr. Dinesh Mittal said the couple had called Dr. Batra to cancel his services.

Later the same day, Gurjit Kaur, who lives in the village of Daffarpur, about six miles from Dera Bassi, volunteered that it was Dr. Batra who did the ultrasound test on her at City Hospital, while Dr. Savita Mittal told her that she was carrying a girl and performed the abortion for 2,000 rupees, about $44.

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-- Lars (larsguy@yahoo.com), April 22, 2001

Answers

I think the same thing is happening in China.

-- Lars (larsguy@yahoo.com), April 22, 2001.

Lars,

Oh the irony.

The liberal left's favorite pastime, abortion, being used to directly discriminate against females.

-- J (Y2J@home.comm), April 23, 2001.

Article: "Neglect of the health and nutrition of girls and women and high rates of maternal death in childbirth helped give males a survival edge."

Pop quiz!

Assume abortion is not available in India under any circumstances. What is the probability that any girl child, whose parents value her so little that they would willingly abort her, would suffer from neglect or abuse from those same parents after being born?

Time's up! If you said the probability was "very high", you pass.

-- Little Nipper (canis@minor.net), April 23, 2001.

In 20 years there might be some very horny, very angry young Indian and Chinese males looking for someone to rape.

-- Lars (larsguy@yahoo.com), April 23, 2001.

I wonder how many of these women believe that by aborting the female fetuses they are saving them from a life of abuse and neglect.

I wonder how many of these women choose aborting their daughters because watching them suffer after birth would be too painful.

What is the mindset of a society that cares for their daughters so little? How long can it survive in the modern world?

On the one hand, these countries are facing over-population problems. They legalize abortion and enforce limits on family size. On the other hand, these policies are creating another problem - gender imbalance. Eventually the males will go elsewhere to find females. Not good for the future of a country or race.

It's almost as if these women may be saying - 'You won't love, honor and care for our daughters? Then you won't have our daughters. And when the time comes that you miss our daughters you will learn how to care for them.'

OTOH ... the governments may just step in, insist that women give birth to a female baby and life will go on as usual.

-- Debra (Thisis@it.com), April 24, 2001.

It is a dreadful fact that the earliest form of abuse and oppression of women continues to take place in the womb. Every year in America, 750,000 preborn females are ushered out of the place that should be the safest environment for every human being.

Elsewhere, abortion has become the primary means of eliminating unwanted females. Newsweek reports that of 8,000 amniocentesis tests in Bombay, India, all but one that verified a female infant resulted in an abortion. According to Time, "In South Korea, where fetal testing to determine sex is common, male births exceed female births by 14 percent, in contrast to a worldwide average of 5 percent. In Guangdong province, the China news agency Xinhua reported, 500,000 bachelors are approaching middle age without hopes of marrying, because they outnumber women ages 30 to 45 by more than 10 to 1."

Feminism is correct when it protests violence against women and children. Unfortunately, abortion is never mentioned in this context. "Abortion kills a living human being and mutilates another," says feminist writer Rachel McNair. "Surgery done on a healthy body is mutilation, and such surgery done without adequately informed consent is battery. Legalized abortion without even minimal informed consent is widespread, epidemic battering of women."

From Real Feminists are Pro-Life.

Debra--

No way to prove it, but my bet is that the "choice" to abort female unborns in China, India and who knows where else is made by men and not by the pregnant women.

I doubt if Margaret Sanger would approve of abortion used against female fetuses.

It does get complicated.

-- Lars (larsguy@yahoo.com), April 24, 2001.

Another good side effect of the excess of angry young males twenty years from now is that India will have a ready-made army to push into Pakistan. The government is probably encouraging this practice.

-- Conspiracy (nuts@r.us), April 24, 2001.