A tale of 200 million girls who are missing!

In India, China and many other parts of the world today, girls are killed, aborted and abandoned simply because they are girls. The United Nations estimates as many as 200 million girls are missing in the world today because of this so-called “gendercide”.

Today India and China eliminate more girls than the number of girls born in America every year.

The United Nations estimates estimates as many as "200 million girls" are missing in the world today.

A heart wrenching account of this malaise. Don't miss the last interview of a Tamil woman.

The three deadliest words in the world : "It's a girl"

Indians in Norway aborting girls : Study

Norwegian-Indian woman give birth to abnormally high numbers of boys, a study has shown, sparking fears that families are deliberately aborting female foetuses.

“Our study seems to indicate that some parents of Indian origin are practising sex-selective abortion,” said researcher Are Hugo Pripp at the national hospital (Rikshospitalet) to newspaper VG.

The study, which looks specifically at the third and fourth children born to mothers of Indian and Pakistani origin from 1969 to 2005, shows that the ratio of girls to boys changed dramatically among Indian-Norwegian mothers after ultrasound scans became available in Norway in 1987.

A report in The Local, Norway's newspaper in English. Here

Nakushis: Unwanted girls of Maharashtra

Maharashtra will embark on a unique renaming exercise this week. Shocked that 222 girls in Chief Minister Prithviraj Chavan’s home district of Satara were named ‘Nakushi’ — meaning unwanted in Marathi — district officials have organised a public renaming ceremony for them on October 21.

The aim is to re-inforce that the girl child is wanted in a state that has one of the worst child sex ratios in the country. Satara, a well-off district, has an even lower child sex ratio than the state’s average of 881.

The practice of naming the girls Nakushi was discovered last year when district health officer Dr Bhagwan Pawar noticed a name-board on a house. He found out that it was not unusual for parents to name their daughters Nakushi.

“So strong is the desire for a male child that these girls are called Nakushi, without any proper naming ceremony,” said Pawar.

This year, health officials launched a drive to identify the girls — and found 11 Nakushis in Satara taluka, five in Javli, 92 in Patan, 12 in Mahabaleshwar, 11 in Khandala, 53 in Maan, 11 each in Phaltan and Khatav and 16 in Chavan’s hometown Karad. 

Swatee Kher in Indian Express. Here

India's unwanted daughters and the American connection

AS HE walked into the maternity ward of Lok Nayak Jayaprakash Narayan Hospital in Delhi on his first day at work in 1978, Puneet Bedi, a medical student, saw a cat bound past him “with a bloody blob dangling from its mouth.” “What was that thing—wet with blood, mangled, about the size of Bedi’s fist?” he remembers thinking. “Before long it struck him. Near the bed, in a tray normally reserved for disposing of used instruments, lay a fetus of five or six months, soaking in a pool of blood…He told a nurse, then a doctor, I saw a cat eat a fetus. Nobody on duty seemed concerned, however.” Mara Hvistendahl, a writer at Science magazine, is profoundly concerned, both about the fact that abortion was treated so casually, and the reason. “Why had the fetus not been disposed of more carefully? A nurse’s explanation came out cold. “Because it was a girl.”

Sex-selective abortion is one of the largest, least noticed disasters in the world. Though concentrated in China and India, it is practised in rich and poor countries and in Buddhist, Hindu, Christian and Muslim societies alike. Because of males’ greater vulnerability to childhood disease, nature ensures that 105 boys are born for every 100 girls, so the sexes will be equal at marriageable age. Yet China’s sex ratio is 120 boys per 100 girls; India’s is 109 to 100.

The usual view of why this should be stresses traditional “son preference” in South and East Asia. Families wanted a son to bear the family name, to inherit property and to carry out funerary duties. Ms Hvistendahl has little truck with this account, which fails to explain why some of the richest, most outward-looking parts of India and China have the most skewed sex ratios. According to her account, sex-selection technologies were invented in the West, adopted there as a population-control measure and exported to East Asia by Western aid donors and American military officials.

The ultrasound and other technologies that identify the sex of a fetus started out as diagnostic devices to help people with sex-linked diseases, such as haemophilia, conceive healthy children. They were greeted rapturously in America in the 1960s. “Ultrasound Device Takes Guessing Out of Pregnancy” ran one headline. “Control of Life: Audacious Experiments Promise Decades of Added Life” ran another.

But 1960s America was also a period of growing concern (hysteria, even) about population in developing countries. Policymakers, demographers and military men all thought rapid population growth was the biggest single threat to mankind and that drastic measures would be needed to rein it in. One such figure was Paul Ehrlich, whose book, “The Population Bomb”, became a bestseller in 1968. Mr Ehrlich pointed out that some Indian and Chinese parents would go on having daughter after daughter until the longed-for son arrived. If, he argued, they could be guaranteed a son right away, those preliminary daughters would not be born, and population growth would be lower. Sex selection became a tool in a wider battle to stop “overpopulation”.

But how did an obsession of Western policymakers turn into the widespread practice of destroying female fetuses in Asia? Partly, argues Ms Hvistendahl, through aid. The Ford and Rockefeller Foundations gave over $3m to the All-India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS) in the 1960s, helping it to pioneer India’s first amniocentesis tests, initially for genetic abnormalities and later for identifying fetal sex. India at that time was the World Bank’s biggest client, and the bank made loans for health projects conditional on population control.

A review of the book Unnatural Selection by Mara Hvistendahl in The Economist. Here

Mathrubhoomi (Motherland): A Nation Without Women

WE are a fascinating land of amazing contrasts. In the land of Seeta, Saraswati and Durga, women face depths of depravity. Uttar Pradesh, India's most populous state, witnessed more than a dozen rapes in about 72 hours. And this is a state that not just sends the largest number of lawmakers to Parliament, it is ruled by a powerful woman. Things are not dramatically different in rest of the country. In fact, national capital New Delhi is also the “rape capital” of the nation.

The largest democracy on the planet is turning increasingly inhospitable to the other half of the population. For all its breathless economic growth of recent years, India reports a high incidence of sexual assaults on women, one of the highest in the world. As many as 85 percent of women in New Delhi fear being sexually targeted when they step out of their homes.

Again, New Delhi is ruled by a woman chief minister, Sheila Dikshit. Indeed, for the first time in our history, we have four women heading four crucial states, not to forget Sonia Gandhi, the Congress president and the power behind Manmohan Singh's throne.

In fact, women have never had it so good in terms of both political and economic empowerment. They just do not beat boys every year in every examination, they have been challenging male dominance in virtually every sphere of activity— from banking and business to Bollywood to sports and in professions that have traditionally been male bastions.

Yet this extraordinary economic and political ascent of Indian women has also seen a disturbing and proportionate rise in crimes against the fair sex, probably a natural progression of male chauvinism. This silent war on women is not confined to sexual abuse and harassment at work place and in colleges and universities. We are killing women even before they arrive in this world. While we have always been a sexist society, science and new technology have honed our deep-seated prejudices and old-fashioned insecurities to a deadly perfection.

The 2011 census of India offers disturbing findings. The gap between the number of girls per 1,000 boys has widened to 914, a decrease from 927 a decade ago. The girl child in India is fast becoming an endangered species, thanks to an increasing use of what is euphemistically known as "gender selection." This is nothing but cold blooded murder, as ruthless as the heinous practice of the pagan Arabs and ancient Rajputs to bury girls alive in the name of some elusive honor.

As India gets richer and its economic growth rate competes with China, it's increasingly shutting the door on its girl children. And female feticide or the so-called sex selection using ultrasound technology is not limited to metros or big cities anymore.

Thanks to our economic liberation and an increasingly profit-driven medical industry, the blessing of ultrasound technology has now invaded the remotest parts of rural India. Identifying and eliminating female of the species has become a massive, self-feeding industry. Indeed, it's a booming market out there that sells death and thrives with hospitals, companies selling ultrasound machines and prospective parents of course all being part of a conspiracy of silence. Ironically, India's most prosperous states, Gujarat, Punjab and Haryana, are also its deadliest for girls. Being 10 to 15 percent of girls in these states are killed in their mothers' wombs. Over the past one decade, an estimated 15 million of girls were killed using the technology that was actually supposed to save lives.

Nearly 1500 girls are aborted everyday, as against 250 Indians who are killed in traffic accidents. Natural selection should and would have yielded an additional 600,000 girls every year. According to UNICEF, some 7,000 fewer girls are born every day than ought to be. The financial capital and home of the Bollywood dream industry, Mumbai, boasts a ratio of 874 girls, one of the lowest in the country. Jhajjar district in Haryana could well be the capital of female feticide, with 774 girls against 1,000 boys. No wonder in recent years the ratio of women across the billion plus nation has fallen to alarming proportions.

This was perhaps only inevitable in a culture in which boys have always been celebrated and pampered and girls made to feel unwelcome like nowhere else in the world. The child sex ratio is only emblematic of the status of women in the country.

Stand back and look at the issue: This is nothing but another form of rape and abuse. Except it enjoys the sanction of society. Killing machines that these “ultrasound clinics” essentially are do not operate in secret. They do business with impunity in full public view and right in the heart of our cities and towns and no eyebrows are raised. And all this has been happening right under the nose of successive governments led by Sonia Gandhi's Congress and the sole champions and defenders of Mother India, Bharatiya Janata Party.

It's not as if there are no laws.  The Prohibition of Sex Selection Act or PNDT came into being in 1994 but has never been enforced. In 2001, the Supreme Court ordered central and state governments to strictly enforce the law by forming vigil squads. Little has changed though.

Indeed, the last decade has turned out to be the deadliest yet for girl children. Why do we insecure and arrogant men forget that our own existence is owed to women? Would we exist without the existence and magnanimity of our mothers? And I say this as a son, brother and father of girl children. We should be ashamed of ourselves and what we have visited on our women over the years and decades. Who has given us the right to deny a fellow human something that does not belong to us? Since when have we become God? The giving and taking of life is the right of the One who gave us life too.

Where do we go from here, or rather, where would we end up with our sick, morbid obsession with boys and lethal aversion to girls? Some answers are offered by a chilling, if slightly skewed, film called Mathrubhoomi (Motherland): A Nation Without Women. The movie is set in a future Indian village that, yearning for a boy, kills its newborn girls one after another. It eventually ends up as a village with no women. So the men try to quench their natural cravings with the help of porn and animals. When a father finally finds a bride for his youngest son, she ends up being "used" not just by the entire family but the whole village. I know the movie is absurdly exaggerated. But if we are going the way we are going, we could very well end up in another Mathrubhoomi.

Aijaz Zaka Syed in Arab News. Here