Gender Abortions in India

India's lost daughters: Abortion toll in millions.

In India, gender abortions in millions
By Amelia Gentleman
International Herald Tribune
MONDAY, JANUARY 9, 2006

NEW DELHI As many as 10 million female fetuses may have been aborted in India over the past 20 years as families try to secure a male heir, according to a study published Monday in The Lancet, the British medical journal.

In the two decades since the wide availability of ultrasound equipment, which allows prenatal determination of sex, the number of girls born in India has declined steeply, despite a law banning doctors from revealing the sex of a fetus to parents.

Although the routine aborting of female fetuses has been widely documented, the study puts new light on the scale of the practice. Experts in India said Monday that they hoped the study would prompt the government to enforce the laws against the practice that are already on the books.

Campaigners have been trying to alert the government to the potential long-term social impact of the phenomenon warning that, among other problems, it will make it harder for men to find wives. In China, where a one-child policy is strictly enforced, prenatal sex selection has resulted in an estimated 40 million bachelors.

"We conservatively estimate that prenatal sex determination and selective abortion accounts for 0.5 million missing girls yearly," Dr. Prabhat Jha, a public health professor at the University of Toronto, who headed the research team, said in a statement. "If this practice has been common for most of the past two decades since access to ultrasound became widespread, then a figure of 10 million missing female births would not be unreasonable."

The preference for sons has distorted the gender ratio throughout India. As ultrasound equipment becomes cheaper, allowing more and more Indian clinics to purchase it, the gender imbalance in the population has grown greater. In 1991 there were some 945 women for every 1,000 men. The ratio dropped to 927 females per 1,000 males in 2001.

Jha's team found that parents were more likely to abort a female fetus if the previous child had been a girl. Basing their conclusions on an ongoing Indian national survey of 133,738 births, the researchers concluded that in families where the first child was a girl, the ratio of girls to boys among second children was 759 girls per 1,000 boys - a reflection of the efforts made by families to ensure that at least one of their children was male.

"To have a daughter is socially and emotionally accepted if there is a son, but a daughter's arrival is often unwelcome if the couple already have a daughter," Professor Shirish Sheth, of the Breach Candy Hospital in Mumbai, India, wrote in a commentary on the findings.

"Daughters are regarded as a liability," the professor continued. "Because she will eventually belong to the family of her future husband, expenditure on her will benefit others. In some communities where the custom of dowry prevails, the cost of her dowry could be phenomenal."

The study found that religion played no role in the phenomenon, but that well-educated and better-off families were more likely to find ways of breaking the law on prenatal sex selection.

Despite the ban in 1994 on revealing the sex of a fetus, the law is widely ignored and there is little attempt to enforce it. In theory, pregnant women who seek help for sex selection could face a three-year prison sentence and a 50,000 rupee, or $1,100 fine, while doctors can have their medical license suspended, but no case has yet come to court.

Dr. Sabhu George, who has been researching the phenomenon for the past 21 years, said the data from the study did not surprise him.

"Over the next five years, we could see over one million fetuses eliminated every year," George said. "The future is frightening."