“Equal Rights, Equal Opportunities : Progress for All”, such is the theme chosen by UNIFEM for the 35th UN Woman’s Day, celebrated on March 8th, 2010.
In every girl, there is a woman in the making. For the rights of women to be respected, the potentialities of girls must be enhanced. The girl must be enabled to open up, and in the first place, be given the right to be born. A right not respected in a number of countries.
Gwalior, India, February 2010 : hundreds of people gather for a silent rally, hand in hand. For what purpose? Protesting against selective abortion and female infanticide. “Save Daughters” claim the posters brandished by men and women participants. In India, the average birth ratio is 945 girls to 1’000 boys : as for this Madhya Pradesh region, the situation is even worse : 888 girls only… In other Indian States, like Rajasthan, villages boast about seeing no female birth in the past … ten years.
WHO has drafted a list of world places where son preference is particularly obvious. India ranks high, together with several Asian countries : Bangladesh, China, Nepal… The Middle-East, as well as some regions of Africa and Latin America, are affected too. “A dawn in the Gods’ dwelling” the birth of a son gives way to numerous celebrations. On the opposite, raising a girl is watering the neighbour’s garden, according to an Indian saying.
Legalised in 1971, abortion has met growing success in India. About thirty years later, the official 2001 census brought the appalling demonstration that, in the billion of Indian citizens, there was a “gap” of 36 million women, prevented from being born or killed at birth. Others, abandoned, had died at a tender age. Today, about 106’000 female fetuses are eliminated by abortion every year in this country, following tests forecasting the sex of the baby.
Although such ultrasounds are forbidden by national law since 1994, recent research tends to show that selective abortion is still flourishing as a family planning device. Neither law, nor its amendment, nor raids in clinics to catch perpetrators in the act, could curb this phenomenon: physicians seem to operate in complete impunity (no prison sentencing so far). As for the number of killings of recently born girls (poisoning, suffocating, starving, etc.), their number is estimated at 10’000 a year by a 2000 study of the US Department of State.
The root causes of such practices are multifold. Religious tradition, e.g., demands a son, a sole heir of name and heritage, to perform rituals at the death of the father. Girls for their part are seen mainly as a financial burden : the traditional dowry, the expenses of a wedding, are likely to swallow a hole life’s savings… Social and family pressure operate to the extent that a woman is not worthy of the name unless she gives birth to a baby boy1 . When the baby is a girl, beside shame and reject form the community, the risk to be repudiated by her husband and in-laws, or to suffer abuse, is more than real. In some cases, the price paid by the woman is life itself. In view of all this, some physicians carry out abortions of female fetuses in the mind to do a favour to women.
If immediate consequences of this silent genocide are tragic, so are the results of an over-masculine society. Rape, prostitution, abduction of teenage girls, are as many forms of violence faced by the girls who survived. In regions with the most marked deficit, men are prevented to marry. Well-off men can afford to by women victims of traffic, leaving young men with modest means aside. This trade of brides threatens to bring back polyandry, mostly in cases where the family is not wealthy enough to provide a wife for each of its sons.
Nature is a faultless creation. The biologic norm –about 105 births of boys to 100 births of girls – shows remarkable regularity, all over the world. In every place where humankind shows some humanity…
1 Paradoxically, the deficit in women is larger in wealthy families with access to a good education, as in less privileged walks of life
Sources :
Missing girls – stop female foeticide
"Broken bodies- broken dreams : violence against women exposed" ONU - OCHA/IRIN, 2007
"A Girl's Right to Live, Foeticide and Girl Infanticide ", Working group on the girl Child, NGO Committee on the Status of Women – Geneva, 2007
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