The Endangered Species

Recently I came across an article in Newsweek which has caused a real furor in India and South Asian circles, because it deals with the practice of female feticide – that is, the abortion of female fetuses in favor of male ones.

You’d think that the practice was limited to the uneducated, poor classes, for whom a male child is another pair of hands to help in the fields, one less dowry to pay, one less useless mouth to feed. But the surprising findings are that this trend has increased not in the lower classes, but the wealthier ones. According to the article, the number of girls six and under has dropped most drastically since 1991 in wealthy urban districts with high literacy rates. Quoting the Newsweek article: “In Delhi, the girls-to-boys ratio dropped from 945 per 1000 to 865. Areas that include the capital’s toniest neighborhoods had as few as 796 girls.”

The article goes on to describe how modern technology is reinforcing the old values that favor sons over daughters; ultrasounds are easily and cheaply available, to compliment the abortions that have been available for years now. Often the two services can be found in the same clinic, or door-to-door in the same building. An ultrasound costs $40 (two thousand rupees). An abortion costs around $100. Compared to a Rs. 200,000 dowry, those degrees from IIT should come in fairly handy when it comes time to do the math.

South Asia has had a tradition of treating female children abominably anyway; denying them food, education, access to proper medical care, and outright abandoning or murdering them in the worst cases. Now, we’ve enlisted technology to help us with the gendercide. We can look forward, then, to a society in about twenty years that will go through what China is going through today: bride buying, kidnapping of women from poor provinces, a male population that is frustrated and sexually even more predatory than it is right now.

Even the comforting thought of men obsessively worrying that they may never get married (a traditionally female domain) because there are no good women – hell, there are no women, period - does little to assuage the outrage that these findings tend to evoke. Half the people will feel sick that this sort of thing is going on in our supposedly modern and educated classes, while the other half will make themselves sick trying to deny that any such thing ever happens in our part of the world.

An interactor on Chowk recently posed two questions to feminists and non-feminists alike: Should abortion be considered feticide? And if women have an inalienable right to carry a pregnancy to full term, do they have the same right to abort that pregnancy, no matter what the reason, making female feticide a valid choice?

To answer the first question: there are groups that already consider abortions "murder". This discussion is moot in a country like India, where abortion is legal, but checking for sex is not. In neighboring Pakistan, a Muslim country, checking for sex is perfectly acceptable, but there is a great stigma attached to abortion for whatever reason. Whether you check for sex or not is your option, in my opinion, but what you choose to do to your fetus based upon that knowledge is where the issue of “murder” then becomes involved.

However, this is a slippery slope. Who can really tell, apart from the parents, why they decided to abort a fetus? I can’t see anyone admitting in court that they did it because it was a girl, although most people doing this will admit, albeit anonymously, that sex was indeed their motivation. Further, who is to decide the conditions for a "legal" abortion and "illegal" abortion? Is the stigma of carrying a fetus that is the result of a rape, or the trauma of carrying a fetus that has wide scale deformities, as bad as the stigma of carrying a female fetus? Would both conditions then be equally valid for abortion? I can see it being argued in court by scurrilous lawyers in the near future: someone will argue that their client was so shamed by her family for bearing an eighth daughter that she was put under pressure to abort her fetus, therefore she should not be proven guilty of feticide.

Feminists will argue that a woman has the right to choice no matter what the circumstances. But I wonder what they would say about the fact that women are choosing abortion because they are carrying female children. The traditional arguments about freedom of choice tend to go out the window when you realize what a Catch-22 situation this actually is. Do you support the woman, or do you protect the unborn girl child? I would argue that a society which has its women so brainwashed that they choose to abort only their female children has been totally overrun by chauvinism and patriarchy, but women are not free of the responsibility of going into the clinic and having the ultrasound and then the abortion. They could also exercise their right to choose to carry the child to term, regardless of sex. No matter which way you look at it, this is truly a dilemma engineered by Satan.

I think it’s universally agreed (except by those who practice it) that killing a fetus because it’s female is a pretty loathsome thing to do. However, I would not crow over this pathetic practice existing in India, and most probably other parts of non-Muslim South Asia. You cannot draw attention to the issue of female feticide while shutting your eyes to the practice in other countries of burying our female children after they are born. This happens every day, in many different forms: honor killings, forced marriages, abductions, rape, molestation, sex slavery, disenfranchisement and destitution. I’m just waiting for the day when South Asian women are added to the WWF’s endangered species list. A lot is going to have to change, in the minds of both South Asian men and women, or else one day we’ll find ourselves up there right next to the Bengal tigers, snow leopards, houbaras, and blind dolphins.