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India - 10.3.2008 |
Massacre of the innocents |
India: the government is trying to fight selective abortion, which kills 2,000 babies every day |
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Written for us
by Elisa Parigi
In India, in 2007, there were on average 2,000 selective abortions a day, which refer to those abortions carried out on female foetuses, and, according to the British medical journal, Lancet, in the last twenty years more than 10 million babies have been killed either before they were born or immediately after their birth by their parents.
 Money for couples who have babies. The Indian government has finally decided to counteract this tendency and to support the birth and upbringing of female children. The minister for the Development of Women and Children, Renuka Chowdhary, has launched a programme entitled “Conditional Transfer of Money for Female Children with Insurance Cover”, which will give a sum of 3,000 dollars to poor families who decide to have female children, with the money being distributed during the first 18 years of the female children’s lives. The programme’s main objective is to eliminate the practice of selective abortion, which has resulted in an increasing imbalance between the number of males and females in India. In 2001 there were 927 females for every 1,000 males, compared with a worldwide average of 1,050, and in some regions, such as Punjab, Haryana, Gujarat, Himachal Pradesh and New Delhi, the number is even lower and decreases to just 800. With the monetary incentive the government is also trying to “encourage families to give their children a better education”, as Renuka Chowdhury explained: “The programme is designed to get families to see that female children are an advantage and not just a burden, since they will be bringing money into the home from the very first day they are born”.
 Save 100,000 children every year. The first payment will be made when the child is born, then, the minister explained, “if the family arranges for the child to be properly vaccinated, it will receive another payment. When the parents enrol the child in school, and if they allow her to continue with her studies, they will receive another payment”, Chowdhury continued. The incentive will cease once the girl reaches 18 but at that point if the girl has completed her studies and has not married, the family will receive another bonus of 2,500 dollars. Chowdhury believes that at lest 100,000 female babies will be saved in the programme’s first year. The law against selective abortions, which was introduced in 1994, and the law forbidding tests for discovering the sex of babies before birth are constantly ignored and in 12 years only one doctor has ever been found guilty of carrying out illegal abortions.
 Just the first step. The programme, however, has also raised many doubts. The incentives are directed at poor families while Bajayalaxmi Nanda, an activist for women’s rights, said “the practice of selective abortion is particularly common among people who are above the poverty level, with those living in cities, the middle classes and the rich practicing it a lot”. The decision to abort is taken not just for financial reasons but also more generally because of Indian culture, where the male is seen as the future head of the family and is the dominant figure in society. “There are many different kinds of pressure”, Nanda explained, including “a form of cultural preference, dowries and the impossibility for females to inherit a family’s goods, land or property”. Many activists believe that in order to stop this firmly established practice, the government must introduce more decisive policies aimed at changing the mentality of the population, since only by doing this will Indian women be able to enjoy the full benefits of the country’s rapid development.
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Translated by Michael Cullity | |
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