The unwelcome sex

She is 18 weeks pregnant. The woman looks anxiously at the face of the ultrasound technician as he scans her abdomen. As he looks at the monitor, the technician suddenly frowns without saying anything. She understands—she has a female fetus inside her. She takes a deep breath. The brightness of her face is already gone.

“Oh my God, this means that I will have to have an abortion again, for the second time,” she cries helplessly.

In many prenatal diagnostic centres in India, frowning is used as a means to express that the fetus being examined is female. A smile indicates the fetus is male. The technician, however, mentions none of this in his report. Prenatal determination of the sex of a fetus is illegal in India. But once known, the fetus may be terminated if it is female—a phenomenon known as female feticide.

The risks to women of repeated abortion include mental problems, infections, bleeding, uterine injuries leading to rupture, sterility, and even death. And this problem is also prevalent in other countries, including mainland China, Taiwan, South Korea, India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Nepal, and Vietnam.¹

The wrong sex?

This was the woman’s fourth pregnancy. Her first two pregnancies resulted in boys, but her subsequent pregnancies were aborted because prenatal examination identified their sex as female. Her family seems determined. Boys, according to her relatives, will continue the family hierarchy, and so unless she conceives a boy, her subsequent pregnancies will end up with the same fate.

She is not alone. She represents the plight of many Indian women throughout the country. Although the phenomena is widely prevalent, exact data on how many female feticides occur in India every year are not available. In 2002 the Indian Medical Association estimated that about five million female fetuses were aborted each year purely on the grounds that the children would be of the “wrong” sex.²

Dangerous traditions

“Invest 500 now, save 50 000 later!” Signs like these displayed in front of diagnostic centres were common in the 1980s and ’90s but are rare now.³ The message is simple—identify the sex now and save the money you’ll squander as dowry when your daughter marries.

Boys are cheaper because of the dowry system, which is still common in India. Once marriage is confirmed, an often exorbitant amount of money is paid by the parents of the bride to the groom’s family. Although payments of dowry are illegal, it is an accepted tradition in India. And it causes anguish to middle and lower class Indian families because inability to pay enough often means that parents can’t find a well educated and settled groom for their daughter. Most marriages in India are still arranged by the parents.

A woman who cannot pay dowry will have to face hardships in her husband’s home—she may be harassed, tortured, and even killed for not having produced the dowry which the two parties agreed before marriage.⁴ A conservative estimate in 1995 by the government of India indicates that about 6000 murders and suicides every year are attributable to the problem of dowry.⁴ The real number may be much higher than this. The system is so deeply rooted in society that the laws that ban it are in effect worthless.

Also, in India, as in many other cultures, boys continue the family name. It is a widely held view that the son should be at the centre of the family fabric, and he is expected to take care of his parents when they become old and frail. For religious reasons, only a son can perform funeral rites for his parents. This, they believe, helps them ascend to heaven after death.

Rising violence

The sex ratio of children—the total number of girls aged 0-6 years per 1000 boys of the same age—in India was 945 in the 1991 census.⁵ But, in the 2001 census, it dropped to 927. With the exception of one state, Kerala, which has a ratio of 1036, almost all other states in India have fewer girls than boys. The northeastern state of Arunachal Pradesh has only 859 girls per 1000 boys, and Chandigarh, a comparatively prosperous territory, has only 790 girls per 1000 boys. Experts are alarmed by what they say are some of the lowest sex ratios in the world.⁶

More extreme sex ratios may lead to abductions, trafficking, and increasing violence against women. Men may find it increasingly difficult to find suitable partners. In fact, some people predict that men will probably start paying dowry—but that will only further define women’s position as a commodity—the more you pay, the luckier you get.⁷

Unlawful but widespread

In 1971 the Medical Termination of Pregnancy Act made abortion legal in India. The law was a healthcare measure to reduce maternal morbidity and mortality resulting from illegal abortions. But this law now serves a different purpose, and the use of abortions to select sex has been rising.

Abortion laws and technical advances, such as high resolution ultrasound, amniocentesis, and chorionic villi sampling, are increasingly used to determine sex with the aim of terminating female fetuses. To curb this the Indian government legislated again in 1994 to prohibit the misuse as well as advertisement of prenatal diagnostic techniques for determining the sex of a fetus leading to female feticide. This forced several diagnostic centres to close down, but many continue.

Legal loopholes

Although prenatal determination of sex and selective abortion are illegal in India, the incidence of female feticide has not decreased. There are two main reasons. Firstly, female feticide is the result of societal attitudes towards women, and such attitudes are not amenable to change by laws alone. The law itself has weaknesses as does its implementation. The first act states termination of pregnancy is allowed if the pregnancy resulted from the failure of a contraceptive. This could be easily misused for selective abortions—how can you prove that a pregnancy was not caused by failure of contraception?

Secondly, given the poor record of implementing laws in India, many doctors and technicians put their economic benefits before the law. “Many doctors ignore the law even though they could lose their medical licence,” says Sharda Jain, a gynaecologist based in New Delhi.⁸

Ways forward

Fighting female feticide should focus on improving the status of women in society. Ensuring education and property rights and more freedom can help. Fighting sex discrimination is a matter of priority, and widespread awareness programmes are necessary. The Indian government also needs to sort out the loopholes that stop proper implementation of existing laws.

The woman had her third and fourth pregnancies terminated because she wants a boy. How many more fetuses will she have destroyed before she gets a baby of the sex she wants? The gruesome tradition of female feticide is incompatible with the economic and technological advances that India has been making in the past few decades. Female feticide is a dark spot on centuries old Indian civilisation, and it must be stopped.

1. Banister J. Son preference in Asia: report of a symposium. Washington, DC: US Census Bureau, 1999. www.census.gov/ipc/www/ebspr96a.html.
2. Slavic Center for Law and Justice. Priests fight sex-selection abortions in India. Strousbourg: SCLJ, 2002. www.sclj.org/news/nr_010813_priests.asp.
3. Patel R. The practice of sex selective abortion in India: may you be the mother of a hundred sons. www.ucis.unc.edu/resources/pubs/carolina/abortion.pdf.
4. Hitchcock A. Rising number of dowry deaths in India. Oak Park, MI: World Socialist Web Site, 2001. www.wsws.org/articles/2001/jul2001/ind-j04.shtml.
5. Census of India 1991 and 2001. India at a glance: female sex ratio. www.censusindia.net/fsex.html.
6. Chetan S, Jain D. Technology and its impact on female feticide in India. Folsom, CA: Government Technology, 2005. www.govtech.net/digitalcommunities/story.php?id=94065.
7. Krantz G, Garcia-Moreno C. Violence against women. J Epidemiol Community Health 2005;59:818-21.
8. Copeland J. Female feticide. Toronto: CBC News, 2004. www.cbc.ca/news/viewpoint/vp_copeland/20040512.html.

       

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