Posted on 07/06/2006 2:44:18 AM PDT by IrishMike
Ten million female foetuses have been illegally aborted in India by mothers desperate to bear a son. What will become of this nation of ever fewer women? ANNE SEBBA investigates: May you be the mother of a hundred sons - this is the Sanskrit blessing given to a Hindu woman in India on her wedding day. And the minute she falls pregnant, there is the traditional chanting of mantras by the other women of the family, calling for the foetus, if female, to be transformed into a male.
Increasingly, such age-old beliefs are becoming a curse in India, as, in this deeply patriarchal society, women have become obsessed with giving birth only to sons.
‘Asking me why I need a son, instead of a daughter, is like asking me why I have two eyes and not one,’ says one woman in the northern district of Haryana, who has just had an abortion after discovering that the baby she was carrying was female.
This woman is by no means alone in taking such shocking and drastic measures to avoid giving birth to a girl. In fact, such is the widespread determination to produce only sons that, since ultrasound scans became widely available in the Eighties, the number of abortions carried out on female foetuses in India has risen at a terrifying pace.
(Excerpt) Read more at dailymail.co.uk ...
Ping for your thoughts.
Thanks again - good threads you started! :)
Yep. Here, 'we' abort our children at a rate of 4000/day for the sake of convenience. Yet another sign of our superiority.
In a few years, instead of the girl's parents having to give a dowry, the man will have to pay the girl's parents a whole bunch of money for her hand in marriage. Call it supply and demand!
Yeah, that'll work :-).
Abortion, Female Infanticide, Foeticide, Son preference in India
According to a recent report by the United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF) up to 50 million girls and women are missing from India' s population as a result of systematic gender discrimination in India. In most countries in the world, there are approximately 105 female births for every 100 males.
In India, there are less than 93 women for every 100 men in the population. The accepted reason for such a disparity is the practice of female infanticide in India, prompted by the existence of a dowry system which requires the family to pay out a great deal of money when a female child is married. For a poor family, the birth of a girl child can signal the beginning of financial ruin and extreme hardship.
However this anti-female bias is by no means limited to poor families. Much of the discrimination is to do with cultural beliefs and social norms. These norms themselves must be challenged if this practice is to stop.
Diagnostic teams with ultrasound scanners which detect the sex of a child advertise with catchlines such as spend 600 rupees now and save 50,000 rupees later.
The implication is that by avoiding a girl, a family will avoid paying a large dowry on the marriage of her daughter. According to UNICEF, the problem is getting worse as scientific methods of detecting the sex of a baby and of performing abortions are improving.
These methods are becoming increasing available in rural areas of India, fuelling fears that the trend towards the abortion of female foetuses is on the increase.
http://www.indianchild.com/abortion_infanticide_foeticide_india.htm
Sati in India
Sati-the Burning of The Widow
Sati is the practice through which widows are voluntarily or forcibly burned alive on their husband's funeral pyre. It was banned in 1829, but had to be banned again in 1956 after a resurgence. There was another revival of the practice in 1981 with another prevention ordinance passed in 1987 (Morgan 1984). The idea justifying sati is that women have worth only in relation to men. This illustrates women's lack of status as individuals in India
FAQs on Sati Courtesy: Miral Patel and Ekta Bhattarai
I. What is Sati?
Hindu custom in India in which the widow was burnt to death on her husband’s pyre. Can be a voluntary choice or forced upon a woman by her in-laws.
II. Reasons for Sati
A widow's status was looked upon as an unwanted burden that prevented her from participating in the household work. Her touch, her voice, her very appearance was considered unholy, impure and something that was to be shunned and abhorred. A woman was considered pure if she committed Sati.
III. The History Behind Sati
Sati, the wife of Daksha, was so overcome at the demise of her husband that she immolated herself on his funeral pyre.
Sati was the consort of Lord Shiva. She burnt herself in fire as protest against her father, Daksha did not give her consort Shiva the respect she thought he deserved.
IV. Theories of Origin
Even though Sati is considered an Indian custom or a Hindu custom it was not practiced all over India by all Hindus but only among certain communities of India.
Sacrificing the widow in her dead husband's funeral or pyre was not unique only to India. This custom was prevalent among Egyptians, Greek, Goths, and others.
Ramayana- Sita walks through fire to prove her purity.
Mahabharata- Madri throws herself on her husband, Pandu’s fire.
V. Outside Views Impact
A few rulers of India like the Mughals, tried to ban this custom.
Italian Traveler Pietro Della Valle (1586-1652) has documented the Sati ritual that he witnessed in the town of Ikkeri in November of 1623.
Colonel William. H. Sleeman (1809 - 1856 A.D.) served as the collector of Jabalpur.
VI. Sati in the Modern times
In general, before this custom was outlawed in 1829, there were a few hundred officially recorded incidences each year.
The efforts of Raja Rammohan Roy and other Hindu reformers greatly impacted the movement to outlaw this practice.
Even after the custom was outlawed, this custom did not vanish completely. It took few decades before this custom almost vanished.
In 1987 an eighteen years old widow, Roop Kanwar, committed Sati in a village of Rajasthan. The 'Sati' version is that Roop told her father-in-law she wanted to commit Sati.
Roop was forced to commit Sati.
The case went to court, but no one was charged with her murder.
Even in the year 2000, you hear about Sati occurring in rural villages.
Thanks for the information.
When will the horrors of dowry and bride-burning end?, asks Himendra Thakur
...Countless brides in India are constantly under harassment in their matrimonial homes because their fathers have fallen behind in the payment of endless dowry installments, or the dowry she did bring to her husband is regarded as too meagre.
Imagine the plight of a young woman, newly wed into an unfamiliar situation, and surrounded by those she has only just met, who regard her as a means to an end, little more than a device by which to enrich themselves. She knows only too well that a bride may be killed for lack of dowry ... she too must have heard the same stories we've all heard ... but she does not know what to do. She may have overheard her in-laws, even her own husband, talk casually about harassing her, and sometimes contemplate even killing her! The kind of fear that instills in a person is beyond our ability to comprehend. It isn't even fear, it is terror.
The cruelest aspect of this menace is the role that brides' parents play in perpetuating it. My inquiry at the Dowry Cell of New Delhi Police Department revealed that most of the parents of the bride do not want to take their daughters back. There is considerable social stigma in India against those parents who shelter a married daughter back in their family. In most of the cases, parents persuade the daughter to go back to her husband's home, that is considered to be the highest form of behavior one can learn from the old scriptures.
The alternative for the scared bride is to go to one of those government shelters. However, these shelters are controlled by unscrupulous bureaucrats and their politician bosses who are accused of taking full advantage of the helpless condition of the victims who come to the shelters. The reputation and working condition of most of the shelters are so horrible that a bride will prefer to die at the hands of her in-laws than to move one of those "shelters".
So, she stays in the house of her in-laws, resigned to her fate. Then, one evening, when she is working in the kitchen, someone throws a pail of kerosene on her, and someone else throws a burning match, and she turns into a ball of flames. Can she save herself by taking off her clothes ? There is no time. Petroleum products like kerosene or gasoline work very fast, aided by her own body heat. Once that splinter is thrown, there is no more chance of life.
Perhaps this sort of recital is gruesome, and we look away. We imagine that it cannot happen to anyone we know, that our education and money has raised us above these village truths. But that isn't so - we merely glamorize the slavery we perpetuate, and pretend to endow our daughters and sisters with "gifts". These aren't dowries, we tell ourselves, this is just to help her get a good start. Conveniently, we overlook the fact that there's more than one person getting married, we don't ask often enough why this good start mustn't come from both sides.
With these pretexts, we dismiss these as unimportant issues. And as we look away, an estimated 25,000 brides are killed or maimed every year in India over dowry disputes.
Intellectuals pull out their calculator and say it is less than 0.003% of India's population. They slide into research mode and throw a vast array of statistics about atrocities on women in USA, UK, Pakistan, and many other countries of the world. Foundation owners refuse to help because there are so many other problems in India like street beggars, lepers, street children, bonded laborers, etc. ...
http://www.indiatogether.org/wehost/nodowri/stats.htm
Thank you for bringing up the topic. Unintended consequences, indeed... very sad.
And the latest from England...........
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2006/07/05/nhealth05.xml
Early terminations push abortion rate to record level
By Sarah Womack, Social Affairs Correspondent
(Filed: 05/07/2006)
Abortions have reached record levels, and nearly a third of women who have an abortion have had one or more before.
Department of Health statistics reveal that abortions in England and Wales rose by more than 700 in 2005, from 185,713 in 2004 to 186,416.
More than 1,000 girls under 15 had an abortion, an increase of 4.7 per cent in a year.
Ping
I was not referring to the abortion issue, but to the lack of wives that will soon be the situation in India and is already a problem in China.
OK ... wanting to be half a world away from that powderkeg is simply rational.
Ironic isn't it?
It would be interesting to get quotes from liberal women politicians on this issue. Senator Hilliary and Feinstein and Minority Leader Barbara Pelosi: What say you?
...Ironic isn't it?
It would be interesting to get quotes from liberal women politicians on this issue. Senator Hilliary and Feinstein and Minority Leader Barbara Pelosi: What say you?
Don't hold your breath waiting, or plan on seeing / hearing this on MSM.
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