Being informed about possible dodgy dealings at a hospital in Ratlam, Madhya Pradesh (MP), police have unearthed plastic bags filled with bone pieces probably from fetuses or newborns, though the exact age nor sex of the children is known. While another headline boasts of India’s rapid telecommunications growth, a striking contrast is evident between the seemingly rapid modernization of some aspects of the economy and society and the nagging persistence of sex-selective abortions and female infanticide.
The state of MP has become infamous for its declining gender ratio, though it is not one of the worst offenders compared to other states. While in 2005 the state Minister for Women and Child Development voiced concerns over the issue and emphasized the necessity of building public awareness against the practice of female foeticide, such pleas seem to have fallen on deaf ears.
Recently the state government decided to take a more hard-line stance by speeding the registration of cases against sonography centres that perform sex determination tests so they can be punished more quickly. These cases fall under the Pre-natal Diagnostic Techniques (Regulation and Prevention of Misuse) Act, which went into effect in 1996 but has not been implemented successfully. At least a glimmer of hope is seen by two NGOs who are using the act to appeal to the courts.
Another proposed solution to the plummeting gender ratio has been a ‘cradle scheme’, i.e. the adoption of girl children by official agencies, implemented in the state of Tamil Nadu but with dubious results seeing as how it required the sterilization of one parent. And now the national government has announced its own version of the scheme because of the ‘crisis situation’. But it’s hard to see how this scheme will help curb the problem when the public is clearly opting to terminate pregnancies when given that option, even if it’s illegal.
Although it does seem like a step in the right direction, such band-aid schemes of targeting the effect of female discrimination are likely to be far less effective than addressing the root cause, which admittedly is a far more daunting prospect. The problem is that son preference is so socially sanctioned that even some urban, well-educated women defy clear-cut assumptions that they may be more accepting of having only girl children (as was shown by statistics of the National Family Health Survey (NFHS) 2005-2006 in Gujarat.) So while in the US women’s right to choice is under peril by right-wing conservatives who seek to limit women’s freedoms, in India the right to abortion is being abused in the name of son preference.
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