India’s Missing Daughters

I agree that it’s the mindset of the people that must change. Banning sex determination ultrasounds will in all likelihood increase the incidence of female infanticide. However, doctors who continue to perform them need to be charged.

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‘All Those Little Faces’: Elizabeth Vargas Explores India’s ‘Gendercide’

By Elizabeth Vargas

Six months ago, I traveled to India to see firsthand what the prime minister of that country calls a national shame. It is the systematic, widespread, shocking elimination of India’s baby girls. Some 50,000 female fetuses are aborted every month in India. Baby girls are often killed at birth, either thrown into rivers, or left to die in garbage dumps. Its estimated that one million girls in India “disappear” every year.

I traveled first to Delhi, where I met a woman who is a member of the privileged, educated class. Her name is Mitu and she is a pediatrician, married to a doctor. When she became pregnant, she said her husband’s family pressured her to have an illegal ultrasound to see if her twins were girls or boys.

There are clinics everywhere in India, offering ultrasounds. We walked down street after street and saw signs everywhere advertising ultrasound services. There are even technicians who pack portable ultrasounds and travel to villages offering their services. The dirty little secret is that many couples use the ultrasound to find out the sex of their baby. If they find it’s a girl, hundreds of thousands of mothers-to-be abort the fetus. 50,000 girl fetuses are aborted every month in India. It is a staggering number. And it has created whole villages where there are hardly any women. We went to one such village in the province of Haryana. Everywhere we looked, we saw boys, young men, old men, but very, very few women. It was unsettling, especially because we knew this was not some freak of nature, but a result of the deliberate extermination of girls.

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Disappearing Daughters: Women Pregnant With Girls Pressured Into Abortions

It is a country with a female president and where men revere female goddesses. And yet, India is far from a haven for women.

According to current estimates, Indian men outnumber women by nearly 40 million. That startling gender gap, activists say, is the result of gendercide.

Nearly 50,000 female fetuses are aborted every month and untold numbers of baby girls are abandoned or murdered.

“It’s the obliteration of a whole class, race, of human beings. It’s half the population of India,” said women’s rights activist Ruchira Gupta of Apne Aap Women Worldwide.

Why is there such deadly discrimination against girls? Part of the answer is money. Girls are a financial burden to their parents, who must pay expensive dowries to marry them off. The dowry is a cultural tradition and the single biggest reason Indians prefer boys.

When an Indian woman gives birth to a baby boy, it is an occasion for jubilation, said women’s rights activist Gita Aravamudan, author of the book, “Disappearing Daughters.”.

Mother Says She Was Tortured to Abort Twin Girls

Those seeking to maintain the status quo, meanwhile, have been aggressive.

Mitu Khurana, 34, a pediatrician and a mother trying to fight the system, said she’s faced death threats for the lawsuit she has filed against her husband and her husband’s family.

Khurana said her parents-in-law tricked her into eating a cake made with eggs, knowing that she was allergic to eggs. She had to go to the emergency room and at the hospital, where, Khurana said, an ultrasound determined that she was pregnant with twin girls. (Watch an interview with Mitu Khurana here.)

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Mitu Khurana’s daughters under new threat

Mitu Khurana’s children under new threat

Dr Mitu Khurana is an Indian doctor and activist whose case we have covered a number of times on Pickled Politics. She is now facing a fresh and imminent threat to her daughters. Her case to date is best summarised by the below two paragraphs:

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Dr. Mitu has been battling her husband and in-laws for years. Her troubles began when she refused to have an ultrasound (which is illegal in India due to the fear of female foeticide if the mother is found to be pregnant with girls); this upset her in-laws, who poisoned her and took her to a hospital in order to have the ultrasound done. When it was found she was pregnant with twin girls, she was pressured to have an abortion. She refused, and when they were born, she was expected to give them up for adoption. She did not want to, so her in-laws started conspiring against her, with her mother in-law pushing her then four month old daughter down the stars on one occasion.

Dr. Mitu eventually left the house with her daughters for good, and filed a complaint under the Pre-Conception and Pre-Natal Diagnostic Techniques (PC-PNDT) Act, the first individual to do so. Since then her in-laws have taken her to court in order to gain partial custody of her children, an action she believes is merely a ploy in order to get her to drop the complaint against them and the hospital. Numerous officials she has encountered have been unsympathetic or downright hostile. A high court judge even told her to reconcile with her husband and in-laws after they had tried to kill one of her daughters. Full Story

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Refusal to Abort Girl-Child Ends in Murder

Man kills pregnant wife who refused to abort girl child

Even as we rue about the lowest ever child sex ratio of 914, revealed by the 2011 Census figures, we have dismally failed to bring about a change in the mindset of a section of the population which sees the girl child as a burden and ruthlessly resorts to indiscriminate violence against women.

In a shocking incident, a man in Kurnool town of Andhra Pradesh on Wednesday beat his pregnant wife to death for carrying a female foetus for the third consecutive time.

According to Kurnool Police, C. Prakash, a private firm employee residing in the Shankar Mutt area of the town, mercilessly beat his wife Surekha (26) after going through her ultra-sound report which revealed she was carrying a girl child.

Surekha, who was in her sixth month of pregnancy, could not withstand the beating and fell unconscious. Her parents immediately took her to the local government hospital, where she was declared brought dead.

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7000 female fetuses aborted daily

Undesired
by Walter Astrada

Click on image to go to video

India is a diverse country, separated by class and ethnicity. But all women confront the cultural pressure to bear a son. This preference cuts through every social divide, from geography to economy. No woman is exempt.

This preference originates from the belief that men make money while women, because of their expensive dowry costs, are a financial burden. As a result, there is a near constant disregard for the lives of women and girls. From birth until old age, women face a constant threat of violence and too frequently, death.

The numbers are staggering. Since 1980, an estimated 40 million women are ‘missing,’ by way of abortion, neglect or murder. 7,000 female fetuses are aborted every day according to the U.N., aborted solely because they are girls. One dowry death is reported every 77 minutes. Countless others are never known.

The government has tried to intervene. Dowry and sex selective abortions are illegal. Yet both practices still thrive, in large part because of deep-rooted cultural prejudices.

Today, eighty percent of Indian states are now facing a shortage of women. To compensate for this differential, young, unknowing women are bought from surrounding countries like Bangladesh and sold to young bachelors. Not knowing a word of the language, these trafficked women now face the same kinds of violence as other Indian women.

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Help Mitu Protect Her Twins: Please Sign This Petition

From Gender Bytes

Hello friends,

This is an emergency situation! We are rallying public support for Dr. Mitu Khurana’s legal fight to protect her 5-year old twin girls from their father. Her case is outlined below. Please sign her petition and circulate it. A copy will be sent to the appropriate offices in Delhi as evidence of public support for her case.

Click here for the petition

Mitu first posted her story on 50 Million Missing’s discussion/support forum about 2 years ago. This is the link for her case where we kept supporters updated on her situation. The relevance of Mitu’s case is monumental in light of India’s systematic annihilation of millions of its daughters.

Within the first few months of her marriage when Mitu was pregnant with twins, her husband and his family colluded with the hospital to secretly determine the gender of the fetuses. They were told she was expecting girls. Her husband and in-laws thereafter started pressurizing her to have an abortion. While it is routine for pregnant women to undergo ultrasound, it is illegal for doctors and hospitals in India to reveal the sex of the fetus during these tests. Despite this law, called the PC&PNDT (Pre-Conception & Pre-natal Diagnostic Test), it is estimated that in India more than a million potential daughters are selectively eliminated before birth each year, sometimes late in the pregnancy so the family can be sure that they are getting rid of a daughter and not a precious son!

Mitu’s case also challenges the assumption that it is poverty and lack of education that is driving this daughter-annihilation. Like Mitu, her husband too is a medical doctor, from a well-do family, and various other members from his family are also doctors! In deed the largest gender ratio gap in India is among the educated, well-to-do, middle and upper classes. It is not that they cannot afford to raise girls, they just don’t want girls!

Mitu’s case is not unique. Thousands of young, married Indian women are tortured, tormented, and forced into aborting their daughters, often late in the pregnancy, at great risk to their own health and lives. Mitu however refused to submit. Thereupon, her husband and mother-in-law subject her to various forms of abuse to induce an abortion.

Visit Gender Bytes to read the article in it’s entirety.

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Not Without My Daughters

Mitu Khurana‘s story published in the Indian magazine Femina – Dec. 30, 2009 issue

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Mitu Khurana Tells Her Story

I met and spent time with Mitu Khurana and her daughters in their New Delhi home in early December. She is one of the first women in India to file charges under the PNDT Act despite being offered a bribe of a large sum of money, being continually harassed, and under immense pressure. I’ll be posting more on our meeting soon. In the meantime, please watch and share her story in these videos.

Mitu Khurana: Fighting for her Daughters Lives – Part I

Mitu Khurana: Fighting for her Daughters Lives – Part II

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Woman forced to abort five female foetuses

Woman forced to abort five female foetuses

Story submitted by Mitu Khurana

Amisha Yagnik has accused her husband and in-laws of coercing her into undergoing abortion five times at various clinics in Anand and Vadodara in the past nine years.

The husband and in-laws of a 32-year-old woman were arrested on Sunday for allegedly forcing her to abort five female foetuses and tormenting her for dowry. The three, who are natives of Anand, were apprehended after the woman, Amisha Yagnik, revealed to the Vastrapur police how she was press-ganged into undergoing abortions between August 2001 and January this year.

Amisha alleges that her husband, Priyavadan, and in-laws, Gunvantrai and Niranjana Bhatt, forced her to undergo illegal tests that help determine the sex of an unborn child and abortions at various clinics in Anand and Vadodara.

Amisha filed a police complaint on June 12

Amisha, who currently lives with her parents in Vastrapur, claims that she had to literally run away from her husband’s home in Anand to give birth to her daughter, Kamya.

“My husband and his parents are obsessed with having a boy in the family. In the past nine years, they have coerced me into aborting five female foetuses,” the aggrieved 32-year-old told Ahmedabad Mirror. “They don’t consider me a human being. They think I am a machine (that produces babies).”

Amisha aborted her first child in 2001
Amisha married Priyavadan on December 1, 2000. Amisha claims that in just a few months of her marriage, Priyavadan and his parents started demanding dowry. She has told the Vastrapur police that she became pregnant for the first time early in 2001. Priyavadan and his parents, Amisha alleges, coaxed her into undergoing a child sex determination test at Amee Hospital in Anand on August 15, 2001.

Amisha has told the Vastrapur police that the doctor who ran the hospital, Kirit Patel, revealed the sex of her child to Priyavadan through a code word, Jay Mataji. She alleges that her husband and in-laws then took her back home and thrashed her.

A few days later, the three allegedly later took her back to the hospital, made her sign a few documents and forced her to abort the child. The three then apparently paid Rs 3,000 as hush money to Dr Patel. “After the first abortion, Priyavadan and his parents stepped up their demand for dowry,” Amisha has said in her police complaint.

The 32-year-old woman became pregnant for the second time in 2002. Her in-laws, however, took her to a clinic run by Dr Ramesh Patel, who allegedly subjected her to an illegal child sex determination test. After Amisha’s in-laws learnt that she was expecting a girl, they again allegedly coerced her into giving up the child.

In January 2004, Amisha was again expecting a girl child. Fearing that Priyavadan and his parents would force her to undergo an abortion, Amisha ran to her parents’ home in Vastrapur. She didn’t return to Anand until she gave birth to Kamya.

She faced divorce threats
When Privyavadan and his parents came to know about Kamya’s birth, they abused Amisha’s parents. Priyavadan even apparently threatened to divorce her. However, Amisha’s parents managed to persuade Priyavadan to take her back. By the end of 2004, Amisha was pregnant again.

After finding out the sex of the baby, Priyavadan and his parents allegedly took her to Amee Hospital in Anand, and made her undergo yet another abortion on December 13, 2004. Three years later when the 32-year-old woman became pregnant for the fifth time, she was made to abort her child at the same hospital.

On January 9 this year, Amisha’s husband and in-laws forced her to give up another child at Shruti Clinic in Vadodara after learning it was a girl. The 32-year-old woman and her parents then approached a social welfare group, Yogsham Foundation. Members of the group advised them to file a police complaint. A member of the foundation, Rajendra Shukla, later helped Amisha and her parents meet DCP (zone 1) B K Jha, who then directed officials of the Vastrapur police station to file a complaint.

“Apart from making me undergo abortions, my husband and in-laws also harassed me for dowry,” Amisha said. Her father, Jaimin Yagnik, said that could not fulfil dowry demands as he was a retiree. “I did all I could for my daughter when I was working. However, after I retired, it was difficult for me to pay dowry,” Yagnik, who worked with ONGC as an engineer, said.

Meanwhile, an inspector of the Vastrapur police station, R K Ladva, said that action would be taken against the doctors who conducted child sex determination tests.

June 15, 2009

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