Ari Kewalramani's List: Abortion in India

• he Lancets stated that over the last 20 years there have been 10 million missing female births in India.

• up to 50 million girls and women are missing from India' s population as a  result of systematic gender discrimination in India.
•  

    According to a recent report

  • 50 million females have been omitted from the population in India because of discrimination against women.
• (UNICEF)
• most countries
• 105 female births for every 100 males.
• less than 93 women for every 100 men
• norms
• Much of the  discrimination is to do with cultural beliefs and social norms
• be challenged if this practice is to stop.
• ultrasound scanners
• advertise
• spend 600 rupees now and save 50,000 rupees  later.
• the  problem is getting worse
• avoiding a girl,
• a family will avoid  pay
• According to UNICEF
• scientific methods of detecting the sex of a baby  and of performing abortions are improving.
• ing a large dowry on the marriage of her daughte
• increasing  available in rural areas of India
• abortion of  female foetuses is on the increase
• fuelling fears

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• South Korea
• “38 percent of mothers-to-be wanted a daughter, while 31 percent said they preferred a son
• 29 percent a son.”
• 37 percent wanted a daughter
• fathers
• ould decide on the sex of their child
• Twenty years ago
• 116.5 baby boys for every 100 girls born.
• 106.4 boys for every 100 girls
• 2008,
• within the international average
• Maybe
• parents are now less likely to rely on their children for financial support after retirement
• less necessary to have a son
• low national birth rate (the lowest in the world) means that parents who are planning just one child believe a girl will care for them emotionally in their old age.
• Or perhap
• “it’s more fun bringing up girls than boys.”

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• If the first child was male, then the sex of the subsequent children tended to follow the regular, biologically determined sex pattern
• However, if the first child was female, the subsequent children had a much higher probability of being male, indicating that conscious parental choice was involved in determining the sex of the child.
• in the form of selective abortion and perhaps even infanticide and female infant neglect - that is the cause of the skewed gender ratio.^[6]
• preference for boys and the resulting shortage of girls was even more pronounced in the more highly developed Haryana and Punjab regions of India than in poorer areas,
• high prevalence of this prejudice among the more educated and affluent women (mothers) there.
• Only recently and in some countries (particularly South Korea) have the development and educational campaigns begun to turn the tide, resulting in more normal gender ratios.^[9]
• 1980s, girls were not receiving inferior treatment if a girl was born as a first child in a given family, when the parents still had high hopes for obtaining a son later. Subsequent births of girls were however unwelcome, because each such birth diminished a chance of the family having a son.
• Punjab
• educated women would have fewer offspring, and therefore were under more acute pressure to produce a son as early as possible
• decrease her chance of survival
• affluent families opt for an abortion
• r if a girl is born
• As parents grow
• One reason for parents, even mothers, to avoid daughters
• expect much more help and support from their independent sons, than from daughters, who after getting married become in a sense property of their husbands' families
• Women are also often practically unable to inherit real estate, so a mother-widow will lose her family's (in reality her late husband's) plot of land and become indigent if she had had only daughters.
• Poor rural families have meager resources to distribute among their children, which reduces the opportunity to discriminate against girls.^[9]
• South Korea has led to a sweeping change in social attitudes and reduced the preference for sons
• rapid economic development, combined with policies that seek to promote gender equality
• sex ratio transition

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• prenatal selection and selective abortion was causing the loss of 500,000 girls a year.
• 1998.
• more common
• among educated women but did not vary according to religion.
• year 2001
• 1,000 male babies born in India, there were just 933 girls.
• They found that there was an increasing tendency to select boys when previous children had been girls
• preceding child was a girl,
• ratio of
• girls to boy
• 759 to 1,000.
• fell even further when the two preceding children were both girls.
• third child born
• 719 girls to 1,000 boys.
• for a child following the birth of a male child, the gender ratio was roughly equal.
• suggested half a million girls were being lost each year.
• where boys
• an extra pair of hands on the farm.
• girl child
• inferior and a liability - a bride's dowry can cripple a poor family financially.
• Ultrasound machines must be officially registered but many are now so light and portable, they are hard to monitor.
• must not tell couples the sex of a foetus, in practice, some just use coded signals instead, our correspondent says.
• doctors

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• India
• Sex selection
• fostered by a limiting social structure that disallows women from performing the roles that men perform, and relegates women to a lower status level.
• Individual parents
• benefit concretely from having a son born into the family
• society, and girls and women as a group, are harmed by the widespread practice of sex selection.
• reinforces oppression of women and girls.
• eliminate sex selective abortion
• Sex selective infanticide, and slower death by long term neglect, could increase.
• decreases women's autonomy rather than increases it.
• Such practices will turn underground
• If abortion is restricted, the burden is placed on women seeking abortions to show that they have a legally acceptable or legitimate reason for a desired abortion, and this seriously limits women's autonomy.
• better to address the practice of sex selection by elevating the status of women and empowering women so that giving birth to a girl is a real and positive option
• But, if a ban on sex selective abortion or a ban on sex determination is indeed instituted, then wider social change promoting women's status in society should be instituted simultaneously.

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• Preimplantation genetic diagnosis (PGD) enables the identification of genetic diseases in the embryo before pregnancy is established,  and eliminates the need for possible pregnancy termination after prenatal diagnosis of a genetically affected fetus.
• Some couples underwent more than one treatment cycle  and a total of 42 sex selection cycles was started. All couples already had at least one daughter.
• the poor survival of non-transferred embryos following cryopreservation and the  limited amount of cellular material available for diagnosis.

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• In those families where the first two children were girls, the sex ratio of the third child was observed to be 1.51:1 in favor of boys.^[
• Gender bias can broadly impact a society, and it is estimated that by 2020 there could be more than 35 million young "surplus males" in China and 25 million in India
• It has been argued that by having a one-child policy, China has increased the rate of abortion of female fetuses, thereby accelerating a demographic decline.

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• female infanticide reflects the low status accorded to women in most parts of the world
• murdering girls is still sometimes believed to be a wiser course than raising them
• suffer
• that "Sons are called upon to provide the income; they are the ones who do most of the work in the fields.
• igh value given to males decreases the value given to females."
• dowry and wedding
• to more than a million rupees
• average civil servant earns about 100,000 rupees
• In many cases, of course, the women are not independent agents but merely victims of a dominant family ideology based on preference for male children."
• Rajasthan,
• 3,500 abortions of female fetuses annually
• UNICEF
• Bombay in 1984 on abortions after prenatal sex determination stated that 7,999 out of 8,000 of the aborted fetuses were females.
• Rajasthan and Uttar Pradesh [states], it is usual for girls and women to eat less than men and boys and to have their meal after the men and boys had finished eating.
• it is usually boys who have preference in health care
• morbidity.
• clothing
• Indian state governments have sometimes taken measures to diminish the slaughter of infant girls and abortions of female fetuses.
• tate with one or two daughters and no sons
• f one parent undergoes sterilization, the government will give the family [U.S.] \\$160 in aid per child.
• The money will be paid in instalments as the girl goes through school. She will also get a small gold ring and on her 20th birthday, a lump sum of $650 to serve as her dowry or defray the expenses of higher education. Four thousand families enrolled in the first year," with 6,000 to 8,000 expected to join annually (as of 1994

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• Audio and video evidence showed the doctor telling one woman that tests had revealed that she was carrying a "female foetus and it would be taken care of".
• But convictions are rare due to lax and corrupt officials and the slow judicial system.
• Earlier this year researchers in India and Canada said in the Lancet journal that prenatal selection and selective abortion was causing the loss of 500,000 girl births a year.
• Indian doctors, however, disputed the report saying pre-birth gender checks had waned since a Supreme Court crackdown in 2001.
• Experts in India say female foeticide is mostly linked to socio-economic factors.

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• By law, the government can regulate - but not deny - the use of prenatal diagnostic techniques for the purposes of detecting birth defects, but not gender itself.
• it is rare to see a doctor prosecuted if he does so.
• "Women who choose this technique may be victims of discrimination themselves
• and they may not be the decisionmakers.
• The cost of not paying a larger dowry can be even higher.
• couples eat flatbread and onions to ensure a boy child.

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• family in Haryana, in the north-west of the country, which had resorted to sending out to Bangladesh to find a young woman from a poor family, and brought her back to marry their son in exchange for money.