Female Infanticide
I have a eight month daughter. Not a single day goes by when I don't look at her face and fall in love with her all over again. She is so innocent and cute and bubbly that I feel like hugging her every now and then.
Sometimes when I am holding her small and soft hands, I cannot help but think of those unfortunate baby girls who are born to unwanting parents. In all cases, specifically female infanticide reflects the low status accorded to women in most parts of the world; it is arguably the most brutal and destructive manifestation of the anti-female bias that pervades "patriarchal" societies. There are few places in India where new born infants(girls) are starved to death since their parents do not simply want them in the family. They are so poor they cannot afford to pay for sex determination during pregnancy and so this happens to be the best and the most convenient way to get rid of the baby girls.
With the advent of modern times, sex determination during pregnancy has been reduced to a simple and short medical procedure. It became so popular in India that families who could afford to have it would undoubtedly go for it and upon knowing that the yet born is a female would then abort it. The goverment had to ban the sex determination practice as it was leading to a catastrophic skewed male to female sex ratio.
The following is an excerpt from a well known Indian daily....'Experts also point out that no doctors or nursing home owners have been booked so far despite the practice being rampant. "The implementing and regulatory machinery is at fault and while the Government has laid down rules implementation is clearing lacking and the Capital is no more a model city, it is place that has become unsafe for the girl child, it is a red alert situation really," explained well-known social activist Brinda Karat.'
The hatred or the dislike for female babies has nothing to do with awareness or education. In fact many well educated parents in India consider themselves unlucky when they are unable to have a baby boy.
I think the secret lies in years of tradition and culture which has evolved to be main culprit for female infanticide. Traditionally a girl has always been considered a liability. Boys were sent to schools while the girls stayed indoors. They were taught to cook and serve their husbands right(when they were married).Large dowries were offered along with a girl to make her a attractive bride for the prospective groom. So a father had to be really rich to afford a couple of baby girls.
In a particularly disturbing story by Mr Dahlburg, "Where killing baby girls 'is no big sin'," The Los Angeles Times [in The Toronto Star, February 28, 1994.]) he writes... (Tamilnadu) Lakshmi already had one daughter, so when she gave birth to a second girl, she killed her. For the three days of her second child's short life, Lakshmi admits, she refused to nurse her. To silence the infant's famished cries, the impoverished village woman squeezed the milky sap from an oleander shrub, mixed it with castor oil, and forced the poisonous potion down the newborn's throat. The baby bled from the nose, then died soon afterward. Female neighbors buried her in a small hole near Lakshmi's square thatched hut of sunbaked mud. They sympathized with Lakshmi, and in the same circumstances, some would probably have done what she did. For despite the risk of execution by hanging and about 16 months of a much-ballyhooed government scheme to assist families with daughters, in some hamlets of ... Tamil Nadu, murdering girls is still sometimes believed to be a wiser course than raising them. "A daughter is always liabilities. How can I bring up a second?" Lakshmi, 28, answered firmly when asked by a visitor how she could have taken her own child's life eight years ago. "Instead of her suffering the way I do, I thought it was better to get rid of her."
Hopefuly with the advent of western culture and the rising independence of women in the Indian society the tide is beggining to flow in their favor. There's a still a long way to go and I am eager that to see that they get there in the shortest possible time.
Sometimes when I am holding her small and soft hands, I cannot help but think of those unfortunate baby girls who are born to unwanting parents. In all cases, specifically female infanticide reflects the low status accorded to women in most parts of the world; it is arguably the most brutal and destructive manifestation of the anti-female bias that pervades "patriarchal" societies. There are few places in India where new born infants(girls) are starved to death since their parents do not simply want them in the family. They are so poor they cannot afford to pay for sex determination during pregnancy and so this happens to be the best and the most convenient way to get rid of the baby girls.
With the advent of modern times, sex determination during pregnancy has been reduced to a simple and short medical procedure. It became so popular in India that families who could afford to have it would undoubtedly go for it and upon knowing that the yet born is a female would then abort it. The goverment had to ban the sex determination practice as it was leading to a catastrophic skewed male to female sex ratio.
The following is an excerpt from a well known Indian daily....'Experts also point out that no doctors or nursing home owners have been booked so far despite the practice being rampant. "The implementing and regulatory machinery is at fault and while the Government has laid down rules implementation is clearing lacking and the Capital is no more a model city, it is place that has become unsafe for the girl child, it is a red alert situation really," explained well-known social activist Brinda Karat.'
The hatred or the dislike for female babies has nothing to do with awareness or education. In fact many well educated parents in India consider themselves unlucky when they are unable to have a baby boy.
I think the secret lies in years of tradition and culture which has evolved to be main culprit for female infanticide. Traditionally a girl has always been considered a liability. Boys were sent to schools while the girls stayed indoors. They were taught to cook and serve their husbands right(when they were married).Large dowries were offered along with a girl to make her a attractive bride for the prospective groom. So a father had to be really rich to afford a couple of baby girls.
In a particularly disturbing story by Mr Dahlburg, "Where killing baby girls 'is no big sin'," The Los Angeles Times [in The Toronto Star, February 28, 1994.]) he writes... (Tamilnadu) Lakshmi already had one daughter, so when she gave birth to a second girl, she killed her. For the three days of her second child's short life, Lakshmi admits, she refused to nurse her. To silence the infant's famished cries, the impoverished village woman squeezed the milky sap from an oleander shrub, mixed it with castor oil, and forced the poisonous potion down the newborn's throat. The baby bled from the nose, then died soon afterward. Female neighbors buried her in a small hole near Lakshmi's square thatched hut of sunbaked mud. They sympathized with Lakshmi, and in the same circumstances, some would probably have done what she did. For despite the risk of execution by hanging and about 16 months of a much-ballyhooed government scheme to assist families with daughters, in some hamlets of ... Tamil Nadu, murdering girls is still sometimes believed to be a wiser course than raising them. "A daughter is always liabilities. How can I bring up a second?" Lakshmi, 28, answered firmly when asked by a visitor how she could have taken her own child's life eight years ago. "Instead of her suffering the way I do, I thought it was better to get rid of her."
Hopefuly with the advent of western culture and the rising independence of women in the Indian society the tide is beggining to flow in their favor. There's a still a long way to go and I am eager that to see that they get there in the shortest possible time.
posted by Sandip Sinha at
10:38 PM
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