Where have all the little girls gone?

Surprisingly, rural and urban women are similar in their desire for a male child, resulting in millions of abortions every year, finds Mita Kapur.

Imagine having to live with memories like “I delivered four-month-old female foetuses and left them to die on the tray.” This is a lady doctor, recalling her internship years in a medical college in Punjab.

She is the same infertility specialist in Jaipur who was approached by Nita, an educated mother with an appeal to help her conceive a male child by using the centrifugal IVF technology. They select the Y over the X, while the X is what makes sure that we all exist. Reasons? “Someone is needed to carry forward my husband’s business and his name.”

The sheer beauty of giving birth to life has been reduced to a mechanical process. Technological fixes are not the answer to social problems. Aminocentesis, ultrasonography, chorian villi biopsy, foetoscopy, maternal serum analysis, etc, are used less for diagnosing congenital abnormalities and excessively for sex-determination.

Shagun

“There are almost 50 sex-selection based abortions taking place in Jaipur everyday, out of the average 250 - 300 that are done daily. Such abortions are paid for, the way we give shagun on auspicious occasions, the rates are Rs 1100, Rs 2100 or Rs 3100, depending on how posh the clinic is,” the doctor added.

Rural women devise their own methods of ejecting the female foetus - inserting twigs inside their uterus or gulping down poisonous herbal concoctions or ingesting quinine tablets to precipitate a miscarriage.

Their job

“I am just doing my job by accommodating the parents. If I don’t do it, someone else will.” Even in Mumbai, 84 per cent of the doctors have admitted to being a ‘party to the crime’. Female foeticide is a way of life. Why do we accept and continue to live in cushioned comfort zones that turn a blind eye and a closed mind towards violence against a woman?

Kavita Srivastava, General Secretary, PUCL in Rajasthan said, “I was shocked when the local television correspondent here told me that she would have never gone in for a sex-determination test but was happy and relieved that her second baby was a son.”

Are we allowing Indian women to become an endangered species? The social mindset has to change to prevent the grossness of social imbalances that plague us. Why is it that the birth of a girl child is celebrated only in a brothel? Why do we hanker for the ‘Y’, why don’t we say Y not?