Posted on 09/12/2013 8:45:53 AM PDT by xzins
Indian parents killed an estimated 6 million girls in the last decade, but U.S. lawmakers can’t agree on what to do about it
Preema, a young woman from a rural village in southern India, is the 12th daughter born to her parents. Yet, she has no older sisters. Each time Preema’s mother became pregnant and gave birth to a girl, she and her husband killed the newborn—disappointed it hadn’t been a boy.
After 12 births, Preema (not her real name), was the only girl they allowed to live.
The young woman’s story was part of testimony offered Tuesday afternoon by Jill McElya, co-founder of the Invisible Girl Project, to a U.S. House subcommittee hearing on “India’s Missing Girls.” The gruesome practice of sex selection by abortion and infanticide is rampant in India, driven by a strong cultural preference for boys. The problem has only gotten worse in recent years.
Rep. Chris Smith, R-N.J., an architect of U.S. anti-trafficking law and the chairman of the Subcommittee on Africa, Global Health, Global Human Rights, and International Organizations, presided over Tuesday’s hearing. “By shining a light on what is happening in India with its missing girls, we hope to move forward towards a world where every woman is valued and deeply respected because of her intrinsic dignity, and where every child is welcome regardless of his or her sex,” he said in an opening statement. By the time the hearing concluded, it was clear that although the participants agreed “gendercide” in Asia is a major human rights problem, they couldn’t agree on how the United States should address it.
India’s 2011 census indicated the scope of the problem: The country has about 37 million more men than women, the result of millions of baby girls being drowned, strangled, or aborted. “We are dealing with a sex selection that has become a genocide,” said Sabu George, a member of India’s Campaign Against Sex Selection, who testified at the hearing. George has fought sex selection and infanticide in India since the ‘80s, and said in the past decade alone, Indian parents eliminated 6 million girls before birth: “This is much larger than the number of Jews killed in the Holocaust.”
In India, a girl’s parents are expected to provide a generous dowry to her future husband. Since many families are poor, they view boys as assets, girls as liabilities: Although a son will grow up to care for his parents when they become old, a girl will leave home, often in her teens, to join her husband and in-laws.
If the husband and his family are unhappy with the bride and her dowry, they might mistreat the girl or even murder her. (This month, statistics from India’s National Crime Records Bureau revealed one woman is murdered every hour in India over dowry disputes.) Wives who are unable to bear boys face further abuse, underscoring a cycle of violence against women in the country.
“I sit before you today 8 1/2 months pregnant with my second daughter,” McElya said. “As a pregnant woman, if I were in India, my in-laws would be pressuring me to have a [sex determination test].” Then she’d be “strong-armed” into aborting the baby if it turned out to be a girl. In one case, highlighted in the documentary It’s a Girl, the husband and in-laws of a woman pregnant with twin girls threw her down a flight of stairs after she refused to have an abortion.
In rural areas, many poor families who can’t afford a gender test resort to infanticide. In Preema’s village, boys outnumbered girls 8 to 1, according to McElya.
The gender imbalance has opened the door to a host of additional cultural evils, including human trafficking. Men who are unable to find wives often resort to buying brides from outside the country, or paying for sex at brothels. In some cases, they have taken up polyandry—sharing one “wife” between several men.
Although both dowries and sex selection are formally illegal in India, the experts at Tuesday’s hearing said officials have little motivation at the national, state, and local government levels to enforce the laws. Some leaders view the culturally ingrained practice as a convenient way to enforce population control.
Matthew Connelly, a history professor at Columbia University, said India’s sex selection epidemic was encouraged by the population control movement promoted in the 1960s by U.S. organizations like Planned Parenthood and Population Council. In written testimony provided to the hearing, Connelly said it was the head of Population Council’s biomedical division, Sheldon Segal, who “first instructed Indian doctors in how to determine the sex of a fetus, and he publicly advocated the practice as a means to control population growth.” In the ‘70s, Indian doctors sterilized millions of people, financed by Western supporters. (China, which has tried to stop population growth with its one-child policy, also has a severe sex-selection problem.)
This is indeed monstrous.
But if the US has aborted about 60 million since the beginning of Roe v Wade, then we have killed about 30 million female babies.
the raven complains because the crow is black
ping
Amen brother. Just because we kill both sexes doesn’t make it right.
People in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones.
Sounds like they should encourage adoption from india to other countries.
It looks like the Republicans have a lot to learn to increase the efficiency of its “war on women” that the Dems are always talking about.
(the above is a totally sarcastic statement)
Killing baby girls is worth bonus points over killing baby boys? Who knew?
“Preema, a young woman from a rural village in southern India, is the 12th daughter born to her parents.”
Wow, 12 girls in a row? There’s a 1/4096 chance of that happening.
This sentence is a non-sequitur.
The US government has nothing to do with it. The Indian government is the controlling legal authority.
I agree. Not our country.
Besides, it’s hypocritical. We’ve aborted about 30 million females in the last 40 years....that’s about what...7 million a year in a country a third the size of India?
FOREIGN AID: Taxing poor people in rich countries for the benefit of rich people in poor countries.
just wait until somebody isolates the “gay” gene and a method for prenatal testing ... it will make the number of “gender selection” abortions pale in comparison ... i’m guessing very few will be “born that way”
37 million more men than women in India, 50+ million more men than women in China, and both with nuclear weapons and hate each other...wonder what could possibly go wrong /s
the gay bomb?
I had not seen the word “gendercide” before, but it is appropriate, and I just now found it defined in Wikipedia.
Guess they didn't get the memo that it's the MAN who determines the gender of the baby.
A total of 87 million plus guys, dont think the gay bomb will work. Their govt’s will find a use for them, and it wont be pretty for the rest of the world.
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