Story on Female Foeticide for Mother & Baby Magazine, March 2010
Imagine taking a head count of 50 million people. It would be a bit like counting the stars, if you were to ever try. Incidentally, the population of France is a little over 60 million. That's the kind of powerful number 50 million is, close to the population of a small nation. If 50 million people were in the threat of being wiped out, would we let it happen?
(click on the image to view original)
We already have.
As of 2005, 50 million women were missing from India. Over a century of slow and steady genocide, in the form of female infanticide and foeticide, dowry-related murders etc., the women who should have been a part of India's population are not here today. They are simply, missing.
From Infanticide to Foeticide
The first Census conducted by the British in 1871, as anticipated, uncovered the skewed sex ratio of the country – about 940 women for every 1000 men. A year earlier, the Infanticide Act had been passed. The Census just statistically confirmed what was always known – the preference for male children was leading to the murder of millions of girls.
“If anything has changed in India, it is this - Infanticide has turned to Foeticide,” says Dr. Sharda Jain, President of the East Delhi Gynaecologists Forum, alluding to the current wide reach and easy availability of sex determination methods like Ultrasound Scans. According to noted gender-activist Sabu George, 16 million Ultrasound Scans have been used to illegally determine the sex of the foetus. (Missing Children of India, International Herald Tribune, 2005).
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