Haq's Musings: Female Fetus Killing

Thursday, February 2, 2012

UN Finds India Most Deadly For Little Girls

Superfreakonomics authors Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner have argued that if women could choose their birthplace, India might not be a wise choice for any of them to be born. They say that those lucky enough not to be aborted as fetuses face inequality and cruelty at every turn because of the low social status given to Indian women.

The latest UN data proves Levitt and Dubner right. An Indian girl aged 1-5 years is 75% more likely to die than an Indian boy, making India the most deadly place for newborn baby girls, according to data released by the UN Department of Economic and Social Affairs (UN-DESA). The data for 150 countries over 40 years shows that India and China are the only two countries in the world where female infant mortality is higher than male infant mortality.

In the decade of 2000s, there were 56 male child deaths for every 100 female child deaths in India, compared with 111 in the developing world. This ratio has got progressively worse since the 1970s in India, even as Pakistan (120) and Sri Lanka (125) have improved.

The BBC recently reported the case of a toddler girl with serious injuries - human bite marks all over her body, broken arms and a partially smashed head - who is on life support at a New Delhi hospital. This latest UN report makes it difficult to dismiss this shocking case as just an isolated incident. It now raises serious questions about persistent and pervasive gender discrimination against girls before and after birth in the country.

The land of former Prime Minister Mrs. Indira Gandhi has been killing its daughters by the millions for decades. Economically resurgent India is witnessing a rapid unfolding of a female genocide across all castes and classes, including the upper caste rich and the educated. Nationwide, the number girls for every 1000 boys has dropped from 975 in 1961 to 910 in 2011. The situation is particularly alarming among upper-caste Hindus in some of the urban areas of Punjab, Rajasthan, Haryana, Himachal Pradesh and Madhya Pradesh, specially in parts of Punjab, where there are only 300 girls for every 1,000 boys, according to Laura Turquet, ActionAid's women's rights policy official.

This latest UN report is a wake-up call for India. Clearly, the problem is much more serious than female abortions. It extends to post natal abuse and neglect leading to high mortality rates for little girls and increasingly skewed male-female ratio. It shows that the Indian government's efforts, like Save the Girl Child, to improve the situation are not working. There is an urgent need for fresh thinking to save the lives of little girls through strong incentives and powerful public-private partnerships.

Here's a video clip about Falak, a baby girl fighting for her life in India: