India's unwanted girls

Jos

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Feb 6, 2010
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India's 2011 census shows a serious decline in the number of girls under the age of seven - activists fear eight million female foetuses may have been aborted in the past decade. The BBC's Geeta Pandey in Delhi explores what has led to this crisis.

Kulwant has three daughters aged 24, 23 and 20 and a son who is 16.

In the years between the birth of her third daughter and her son, Kulwant became pregnant three times.


My mother-in-law said if I had a daughter, my husband would leave me. Thankfully, I had a son.”



Each time, she says, she was forced to abort the foetus by her family after ultrasound tests confirmed that they were girls.

"My mother-in-law taunted me for giving birth to girls. She said her son would divorce me if I didn't bear a son."

Kulwant still has vivid memories of the first abortion. "The baby was nearly five months old. She was beautiful. I miss her, and the others we killed," she says, breaking down, wiping away her tears.

BBC News - Where are India's millions of missing girls?
 
Pretty much universal in Asia.

The deal is, daughters move into the husband's family, becoming one of the husband's family's productive assets. Sons stay with the family.

In multi generation households like you see in rural asia, every person in the family works, so a daughter is someone you raise for 16 years, and absorb all the costs from, then she goes and produces elsewhere. A son stays home.

In multi generation households, the kids help take care of the elderly. A son is social security. A daughter is nothing but a cost.

Africans do things wildly differently, but I am not sure how. Europe and asia have the tradition of dowry, where a woman is expected to pay her way into the household. For some reason, the economics of african households are very different, in that the groom's family has to pay the dowry.

In the asian dramas I watch, the business of dowry is extravagant and expensive.

It has always been thus, but it never makes sense.
 
Sad...really sad

Don't see how India becomes a modern power with such social problems
 
They should work a deal with China. Sooner or later the male/female imbalance there is going to cause a serious problem.
 
It's a huge, destitute population. Multiple-generation families living off trash heaps, dead people floating in the water. It's weird genetic soup.
 
Pretty much universal in Asia.

The deal is, daughters move into the husband's family, becoming one of the husband's family's productive assets. Sons stay with the family.

In multi generation households like you see in rural asia, every person in the family works, so a daughter is someone you raise for 16 years, and absorb all the costs from, then she goes and produces elsewhere. A son stays home.

In multi generation households, the kids help take care of the elderly. A son is social security. A daughter is nothing but a cost.

Africans do things wildly differently, but I am not sure how. Europe and asia have the tradition of dowry, where a woman is expected to pay her way into the household. For some reason, the economics of african households are very different, in that the groom's family has to pay the dowry.

In the asian dramas I watch, the business of dowry is extravagant and expensive.

It has always been thus, but it never makes sense.

That is about the size of it.

In most asian countries girls are worthless unless you can sell them.
 
India's 2011 census shows a serious decline in the number of girls under the age of seven - activists fear eight million female foetuses may have been aborted in the past decade. The BBC's Geeta Pandey in Delhi explores what has led to this crisis.

Kulwant has three daughters aged 24, 23 and 20 and a son who is 16.

In the years between the birth of her third daughter and her son, Kulwant became pregnant three times.


My mother-in-law said if I had a daughter, my husband would leave me. Thankfully, I had a son.”



Each time, she says, she was forced to abort the foetus by her family after ultrasound tests confirmed that they were girls.

"My mother-in-law taunted me for giving birth to girls. She said her son would divorce me if I didn't bear a son."

Kulwant still has vivid memories of the first abortion. "The baby was nearly five months old. She was beautiful. I miss her, and the others we killed," she says, breaking down, wiping away her tears.

BBC News - Where are India's millions of missing girls?



The thing these idiots never understand is that is the male sperm that determines sex of the baby.

 
India's 2011 census shows a serious decline in the number of girls under the age of seven - activists fear eight million female foetuses may have been aborted in the past decade. The BBC's Geeta Pandey in Delhi explores what has led to this crisis.

Kulwant has three daughters aged 24, 23 and 20 and a son who is 16.

In the years between the birth of her third daughter and her son, Kulwant became pregnant three times.


My mother-in-law said if I had a daughter, my husband would leave me. Thankfully, I had a son.”



Each time, she says, she was forced to abort the foetus by her family after ultrasound tests confirmed that they were girls.

"My mother-in-law taunted me for giving birth to girls. She said her son would divorce me if I didn't bear a son."

Kulwant still has vivid memories of the first abortion. "The baby was nearly five months old. She was beautiful. I miss her, and the others we killed," she says, breaking down, wiping away her tears.

BBC News - Where are India's millions of missing girls?

you know, you always hear about big bad america forcing their ways on the rest of the world. And I really believe for the most part we should stay out of the rest of the worlds business. But when I read things like this, i think maybe we don't force our values enough. What a real shame
 
India gonna have an overabundance of men like China is experiencing due to the one-child policy...
:eusa_eh:
Millions of Indian baby girls aborted
May 25, 2011 - NDIA has aborted up to six million female fetuses in the past decade and up to 12 million since 1980, says a new study that estimates the country now has 7.1 million fewer girls than boys under six.
The female shortfall is likely to have dire social consequences, particularly in northern India, where some of the most severe gender imbalances exist, and which already has higher rates of sexual assaults and kidnappings. The study into India's infamous "missing girls", published in The Lancet, suggests sex-selective abortions have become a grisly marker of Indian middle-class aspirations. The most skewed child-sex ratio imbalances are in the wealthier, urban families where the first child was a girl and the mother had at least 10 years of schooling. In poorer Indian states - where access to ultrasound tests is limited - sex ratios are higher, leading health workers to conclude it is only endemic poverty and a lack of development saving girl babies from the widespread culling seen in wealthy states such as Haryana and Punjab.

"Sex ratios fell sharply in the 20 per cent of the richest households by contrast with non-significant increases in the 20 per cent of the poorest households," the study concluded. "As family sizes in India have fallen substantially it appears selective female abortions are increasingly being used for second or higher-order births if the first born was a girl or in order to ensure at least one boy in the household." But the sex ratio among second-born children in families where the first-born was a boy varied little. Despite its rapid economic progress, India is still a patriarchal society. Boys are often given more food and better education, and girls are seen as a burden because of the persistent, albeit illegal, dowry tradition.

The study by Toronto University's Centre for Global Health, which analysed more than 250,000 births, suggests prenatal ultrasound testing technology in India has added to the sharp incline as families abort girl fetuses in the hope subsequent births will yield a boy. That is despite legislation introduced in 1996 that banned sex determination tests. The study paints an even grimmer picture than that revealed earlier this year in the initial results of India's first census in a decade, which found the gender imbalance was at its most dire since independence in 1947. While the ratio of women to men rose between 2001 and this year, thanks largely to better health services and higher maternal survival rates, the sex ratio of under six-year-old girls to boys is 913 for every 1000 boys, down from 927 girls in 2001.

Those figures led Indian Home Secretary GK Pillai to lament that many reforms over the past 40 years to address the problem "have had no impact". But the Lancet research found that, in families where the first-born was a girl, the ratio of girls to boys born had fallen from 906 girls per 1000 boys in 1990 to 836 girls in 2005, an average annual drop of 0.52 per cent. "The demand for sons among wealthy parents is being satisfied by the medical community through the provision of illegal services of fetal sex-determination and sex-selective abortions," SV Subramanian from the Harvard School of Public Health wrote in an accompanying commentary.

Source
 
Back in the old days, if a girlchild was born in China, it was thrown out in the dung heap.
 

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