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Pakistan: Sex-selective abortion editorial - "Shocking beyond belief" |
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DAWN -- Pakistan
Wednesday January 11, 2006-- Zil Haj 10, 1426 A.H.
Shocking beyond belief
THE news that researchers in Canada and India have found that a staggering 10 million female foetuses might have been selectively terminated following ultrasound tests in India in the last two decades 500,000 girls a year is shocking beyond belief and belies official claims that infanticide has been reduced. While Indian society is not alone in preferring boys to girls, like other countries in the subcontinent, it tends to view a daughter as a liability, particularly because high-cost dowries have to be provided at the time of their marriage. Despite a decades-old ban, many dowry-related crimes are committed against women in India; at one time in the year 2000, a ‘mother-in-law’ section of Tihar prison in Delhi could not accommodate the sheer number of inmates in this section. These findings in the aforementioned report, published in the medical journal The Lancet, only confirm the kind of discrimination women in this part of the world continue to suffer. That this preference for boys is not confined to the illiterate classes is even a greater cause for concern.
The practice continues despite well-intentioned bans like the one outlawing foetal sex discrimination or abortions purely on the basis of gender. A story on Monday in the Hindustan Times reported on advertisements in rural areas “harping on the expense of aborting a female foetus vis-a-vis the cost of dowry at the time of marriage of a daughter.” Analysts argue that if this continues, the gender imbalance already prevalent in India will ultimately lead to alarming social consequences. But the war on female infanticide is not restricted to that country. According to UNFPA, Pakistan, China and South Korea also face similar problems, although of lesser magnitude. The task ahead for the respective governments lies in tackling attitudes that condone female infanticide as well as strictly enforcing the law to prevent such crimes from taking place.
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