Every year, as millions of women marry, they dream of starting a family, of having their homes filled with tiny cries and the happy laughter of gurgling babies. In India however, pregnancy is too often followed by the question of whether the unborn child is a girl or a boy.
Marriage in the Hindu fold of life is still traditionally considered essential for procreation and the continuation of the ‘vansh’ (lineage). Blessings showered on the bride during a wedding, consist of the line “Ashta Putra Saubhagyavati Bhav” meaning “May you be blessed with eight sons.” Thereafter on conception, mantras from the Atharva Veda, one of four most sacred books of Hinduism, are prescribed for chanting so that if the foetus is female it will be transformed into a male.
The traditional joint family is patriarchal. Even though migration and increasing urbanisation has led to more nuclear families, the patriarchal ways are still embedded in the psyche of the Indian man. Despite the legal emancipation of women in India, their education and employment in modern occupations, the traditional bias regarding female children has not undergone a change.
In most parts of the country son is a major obsession. One son is a cause for joy while two are seen as a lifetime for celebration, the traditional thinking being that if one dies, at least the other will live to take care of the parents. In the bargain, pressures on the woman to produce a son are unending. The girl child is seen as an economic drain as her marriage and dowry crushes her family under huge burden of debts.
Almost a quarter of India’s population consists of girls below 20 years of age. The adolescent girl who is an embodiment of childhood and womanhood, is barely a shadow in our national policy and is neglected in the fields of health, education and development programmes. Thousands of female infants are murdered in their mother’s wombs or are born to die, the justification being that a girl child is better dead in a society which views her as a financial burden.
Sex determination techniques began to be publicised through advertisements in newspapers, in trains, buses on walls and pamphlets. Selling the idea of preventing the birth of an unwanted girl child became the order of the day.
Though earliest efforts to eradicate female infanticide in India were made in the nineteenth century during the British rule, the problem of foeticide is a new phenomenon. Although there exists a very comprehensive law on abortion, which is also applicable to the abortion of female foetuses, the very motive of female foeticide forced a review of the existing laws.
Abortion was first legalised under the Indian Penal Code (IPC), which makes the causing of a miscarriage (if not done in good faith to save the life of the woman), an offence punishable with imprisonment up to seven years. Both, the doctor and the concerned woman, are punishable under this. In case carried out without the consent of the woman (a woman under a misconception, a woman with an unsound mind or in an intoxicated state, and a girl below 12 years of age), the person carrying out such an act is punishable for life. The most important provision in the IPC, was the prohibition in killing of a foetus after the twentieth week of pregnancy by when the foetus is recognised as having become ‘quick,’ for which the offender was liable for imprisonment up to 10 years.
The IPC being very strict, did not allow abortions except where there was danger to the life of the mother. As a result, this led to a number of ‘underground’ abortions and consequently to health related problems for the woman. A necessity was therefore felt to review the IPC and make it more lenient. Social scientists are quick to point out that on the contrary, it was around this time that the hysteria of over-population had caught on in the country, which was the actual reason for the government agreeing to review the IPC. Legalising abortions was considered a tool for population control.
Technology combined with a cultural preference for sons rather than daughters has led to the mushrooming of neo-natal clinics across India where parents can check the sex of their unborn child. In some parts of the country parents are choosing to abort if the child is female.
The declining gender ratio in the states of Punjab, Haryana and the capital Delhi have led to crackdowns by the government on such clinics. But in about ten years since India enacted the Pre-Natal Diagnostic Technologies (PNDT) Act only a single person has been convicted!
Since the law against sex determination was passed, most people feel their conscience has been assuaged. But the problem has gone underground. Media attention has been flimsy, reporting a few instances with no serious focus on the issue.
Much has been written about why Indians want fewer girls. The most obvious reason is that girls have to be married off and that entails huge expense on ceremonies and the dowry. Dowry demands are growing with riseinism. The dowry trap pushes many families into debt. Rural families are forced to sell land, urban poor resort to selling their houses or getting into huge debts.
Inevitably, girls are seen as an unwelcome drain on family finances. In rural Haryana, Punjab and Uttar Pradesh, farmers and daily wage workers take loans and make their wives undergo scanning and selective abortions to ensure they bear only sons. The calculation is clear—better to pay a little now than to pay a huge sum later on. Despite the Anti Dowry Act, the practice continues as society thinks that a girl’s parents must pay to ‘unburden’ themselves of their daughters.
The government’s population policy has also had an impact on the incidence of foeticide. While earlier, female children with lower birth orders usually had a fair chance of surviving, the target based population policy has changed this position now. The world-wide acceptance of the ‘small family norm’ has made even first born female children unacceptable and as a consequence the increase in female foeticide.
Since India’s family programme in the 1950s, nothing has convinced couples to have smaller families more than their economic reality. Media, especially television, has convinced people, that not making use of advanced technology to ensure a ‘choice family’ is being irrational and unfair to the mother who has to go undergo the burden of repeated pregnancies in the quest for producing a male heir. Urbanisation and rising aspirations for the next generation, have led people to want fewer children.
Young married couples out to start a family, feel that the availability of sex determination techniques assists them in choosing the sex of the child they wish to have. Therefore, it is all the more important for them to have sons, as the perception persists that boys make more economic sense. Whether their choice would result in a skewed sex ratio leading to social problems for the girl child, is not given adequate thought to.
Today 130 million children do not go to school, of which 70 percent are girls. In India 300 million adults cannot read or write, of which 200 million are girls. Inferior education lowers a girl’s self esteem, her employment opportunities and therefore her ability to participate in the decision-making process. Educated women would tend to delay marriage and also have lesser children. Above all, being economically independent would result in empowerment and as a consequence an improvement in the status of women which Indian patriarchal societies are unwilling to accept.
An imbalance in the sex ratio would have an impact on marriageable ages for women in the future. Child marriages which are on the decline, would once again be resorted to, bringing with it illiteracy and further deterioration in the status of women.
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