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Does death become her? HUMAN beings have devised ingenious ways of ridding themselves of incon-veniences. And no inconvenience is deemed greater by many Indians than the girl child, either before or after her birth. The Medical Termination of Pregnancy Act, 1971, serves as a useful legal instrument for sanctioning murder, once an amniocentesis test — illegal in most states — confirms that the foetus in a pregnant woman’s womb is female.
Where the “advantage” of such a test is unavailable, or the mother too advanced in pregnancy to undergo an abortion, a range of measures has been devised to achieve the same result. They involve stuffing the newborn’s mouth with black salt, lacing the milk she drinks with either pesticide, toothpaste, sedatives, the juice of the poisonous oleander berry or the grains of paddy husk that are capable of slitting the tender gullet. Other options involve suffocating the infant with either a wet towel or a bag of sand or drowning her in a basin of milk. Of course, one can always strangle her, starve her to death, bury her alive or leave her outdoors on a winter night to die of exposure.
Here is a crime that has acquired the unspoken legitimacy of tradition, brooking neither state boundaries nor social strata. Killing of female infants is no less than an established practice in Bihar. Usilimpatti, near Madurai, and Salem, Tamil Nadu, are notorious for the same reason. The Kallars of Tamil Nadu are humane enough to spare the life of the first daughter in the family. Female infanticide is rampant in Rajasthan. According to one report, 26 per cent of Haryana’s young bachelors are unable to find spouses because there aren’t enough women in the state to choose from, thanks to the prevailing trend of suffocating female babies with common salt. A sex-determination test in this state costs a mere Rs 500. Conditioned by patriarchal demands and pres-surised by family members, an expectant mother readily submits to an abortion the moment the sex of the foetus is confirmed to be female. Where the infant escapes abortion, she is subjected to criminal neglect, lowering her life expectancy alarmingly by the time she is five.
Such contempt for the lives of women, compounded by other repressive practices which victimise them including dowry demands, deliberate malnourishment of female children and high maternal mortality rates stemming from lack of prenatal care, accounts for a 100 million missing women in India and China, according to a 1994 UNDP Report. This figure was first computed by economist Amartya Sen.
“The neglect of girls amounts to indirect infanticide,” declared Malini Karkal of the Indian Association of Population Studies. Another reason for the rise in female foeticide and infanticide may be attributed to the Centre’s family planning agenda that strongly discourages couples from having several offspring.
Ravi Verma of the International Institute of Population Studies, Mumbai, argues that when the size of the Indian family is restricted by government-generated propaganda, the tendency to sacrifice female offspring in favour of male ones automatically gains ground.
Contrary to popular assumption, poverty is not the primary reason for propagating this practice, as researchers in Tamil Nadu have discovered. They claim that female infanticide cuts across different socio-economic groups. In 10 districts across India — four each in the prosperous states of Punjab and Haryana and one each in Madhya Pradesh and Tamil Nadu — the sex ratio was only 869 women to every 1000 men as against the national sex ratio of 929 women to 1000 men in 1991.. Today, Panchkula district in Haryana has a sex ratio of 823 females to 1000 males, apparently, the lowest in the country. Interestingly, this ratio favours women in the comparatively poorer states of Arunachal Pradesh, Manipur, Meghalaya, Mizoram and Andhra Pradesh
Another UNICEF report, The Progress of Nations, alleges that due to the factor of “disappearing women”, the number of Indian women is 10 per cent lower than would be expected in demographic terms and amounts to 23 million missing women. What happened to them?
A report co-authored by Kalyani Menon-Sen and AK Shiva Kumar, commissioned by the United Nations and entitled Women in India: How Free? How Equal? confirms the Tamil Nadu research findings about poverty not being the main cause for the low life-expectancy of women. Customs and traditions too, shape choices. These become imperative when resources are scarce, with men getting precedence over women. The outcome: female mortality rates automatically rise.
“It is this lifelong discrimination in nurturing and care that is the real killer of girls. It is less visible and dramatic, but as lethal as female foeticide and infanticide,” writes Kalyani Menon-Sen.
In 1995, Rami Chhabra and Sheel C Nuna co-authored Abortion in India – an Overview, a strong indictment of India’s family planning policies. It reveals how despite the legalisation of medical terminations of pregnancy (MTPs) in India since 1971, for every one legal MTP performed, 10 illegal abortions are carried out. Twenty thousand abortion-related deaths take place every year. An estimated 11.2 million abortions take place in India annually, the highest, apparently, in the world. For every 1,000 live births, 462 abortions take place, which means that for every two children born, one is aborted. While 5.7 million abortions are induced, 4.5 million are spontaneous.
“These spontaneous abortions are a reflection of the poor state of women’s health and the complete absence of concern within their marital family,” the book informs us.
It also points out that of the 1,563 community health centres and 21,641 primary health centres, only 1,800 provide MTP services. A large number of rural women, therefore, have little alternative but to continue risking their lives by devising their own methods for ejecting the foetus. These range from inserting twigs into the uterus to gulping down poisonous herbal concoctions and ingesting quinine tablets to precipitate a miscarriage or an abortion. “Unfortunately, abortion-related deaths are not included in maternal mortality figures,” the book states.
Nearly all studies and reports on female infanticide and foeticide cite dowry as the main cause. This is true, but only to a certain extent. Other reasons for these deaths are a natural corollary of “development”. Viji Srinavasan, who works with Adithi, a women’s organisation in Patna which conducted a study on the incidence of infanticide in Tamil Nadu, offers an unusual reason. She says that the “success” stories of Tamil Nadu’s departments of social welfare, education and health have led to a state-wide acceptance over the last 10 years of the small-family norm.
“All couples,” wrote Srinivasan in an article, “across almost all income groups, want only one or two children. Combined with the social preference for boys, one result has been a growth of female infanticide.”
Contrary to common belief, the progress of science and technology has led to an increasing discrepancy between the male and female populations in the country. Will this raise the status of women in the future? Will this reduce the incidence of rape? Will this eliminate the problem of dowry? Unlikely. Because in the worst-case scenario, an increasing scarcity in the “supply” of women may compel society to auction them for sex and reproductive purposes. Women may find it difficult to venture out, even in broad daylight, and fall prey to a dangerous kind of horse-trading, should they be foolhardy enough to do so. It is high time we woke up to the need for science and our conscience to work in harmony.
But do governments realise that?
Do we?
Shoma A Chatterji
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