Why  are  girls  not  wanted?

There is a terrible practice going on world-wide in which the practice of killing unwanted baby girls in South Asia is prevalent.  An East Indian woman who, unable to contain her laughter, confessed to having killed eight of her infant daughters.

The statistics are sickening. The UN reports approximately 200 million girls in the world today are killed by their parents simply because they don’t want them. India and China are said to murder more female infants than the number of girls born in the United States each year. Lianyungang in China has the worst infant gender ratio on record with 163 boys born for every 100 girls. Taiwan, South Korea and Pakistan are also countries in which unwanted female babies are aborted, killed or abandoned.

This crime which is referred to as Gendercide in South Asia takes many forms. Baby girls are killed or abandoned if not aborted as foetuses. Girls that are not killed often purposely made to suffer malnutrition and medical neglect in hopes that they will die. Sons are favoured when shelter, medicine and food are scarce. Trafficking, dowry deaths, honour killings and deaths resulting from domestic violence are all further evils perpetrated against women. The crime of Femicide has led the Geneva Centre for Democratic Control of Armed Forces to report in Women in an Insecure World that genocide is being secretly carried out against women at a time when deaths resulting from armed conflicts have actually decreased.

The cruel irony of Femicide is that it is an evil that unbelievable as it may seem, is for the most part, perpetrated against girls by women. The most insidious force is often the mother in law, the domestic matriarch, under whose authority the daughter in law lives. Policy efforts to halt infanticide have been directed at mothers, who are often victims themselves. There are many tragic scenes of women having to choose between killing their daughters and their own well-being. In India women who fail to produce sons are beaten, raped or killed so that men can remarry in the hope of procuring a more productive wife. These fools don’t realize that it is the male sperm that decides the sex of the child. However, you don’t see the fathers being killed for this reason.

It is a common argument that parental discrimination between children would end if families across south Asia didn’t suffer from poverty. But two factors of note that suggest that Femicide is a cultural phenomenon and that development and economic policy are only a partial solution. Firstly, there is no evidence of concerted female infanticide among poverty-stricken societies in Africa or the Caribbean. Secondly, it is the affluent and urban middle classes, who are aware of prenatal screenings, who have access to clinics and who can afford abortions that result in the foetuses being killed off. It is believed that as many as 8 million female foetuses have been aborted in India in the last decade.

The Chinese cultural bias towards male children is one exacerbated by the birth control policy. For many years, the population of China was growing exponentially so the government limited parents to one child only. Many parents killed off their baby girls so that they could have a baby boy.

India, however, poses a more complex problem where the primary cause is a cultural one. The culture of valuing children by their economic potential to South Asia’s patriarchal society in which men end up being the sole breadwinners. Sons both carry the family name and they can work at an early age. Then there is the matter of dowries in India.  Legal prohibitions have proved ineffective. In India, dowries were outlawed 1961 and in 1994 the Prenatal Determination Act outlawed gender selective abortions. Yet dowries remain a condition of marriage and action against unregistered or non-compliant clinics have failed to intercept registered medical professionals performing illegal operations.

Strict moral codes, onerous cultural expectations and demanding domestic responsibilities are all forces that further subjugate women. Similarly, economic policed designed to encourage development are necessary but they too are insufficient. Any improvement in living conditions is unlikely to offset the financial burden of raising a child and a dowry in India.

Dr Saleem ur Rehman, director of health services for the Kashmiri Valley, has conceded that a healthy male to female infant ratio in Kashmir in 2001 led him and his team to become complacent. Since 2001, the ratio has dropped from 94.1 to 85.9 girls per 100 boys. This invariably means that many boys who later become adults will not have the opportunity of marrying a woman.

A crude supply and demand distinction can be drawn. Activists argue the demand for eliminating female fetuses is independent of the supply of illegal services. Only those that can afford to abort will do so. Others simply kill or abandon female infants after birth. This foeticide/infanticide equation will only skew towards the latter if the problem of illegal clinics and criminal doctors were solved.

In the New Statesmen, Laurie Penny explained that South Korea improved its infant gender ratio through a programme of education. But one is forced to ask this rhetorical question. “Is increasing the awareness of contraception, abortion laws and women’s rights a panacea?” The answer is definitely not. Educational efforts are far too short of the target of eradicating that particular societies’ cultural canker. A solution therefore must be three-fold. Policy efforts combatting poverty must be supplemented by legal prohibitions. There must be an educational programme informing women of their rights. Finally and most importantly, there must be a social and religions campaign aimed at destroying ossified cultural attitudes.

The secret murder of baby girls is a malaise in response to which government action must surely be justified no matter how severe it may be. In Westernized countries, infanticide is murder and persons convicted of that crime are subjected to severe penalties. 

In Kashmir, officials have enlisted the help of social and religious leaders because it is religious and social leaders that must reinforce legal prohibitions on dowries with campaigns attacking the social pressures of producing one. And they must supplement information of women’s rights by persuading mothers to educate their daughters and to allow their daughters to work. These cultural channels are best placed to begin eroding current sexist cultural evils brought against baby girls.