Female Foeticide and Infanticide in India.

Usha and The Rational Fool have written touching posts on Female Foeticide and Female Infanticide in India. Thought provoking.

Ushas post touches on why Indians seem to prefer a male child and wonders what we women can do to change the situation.

We can be examples of what a woman can be and can do.We can help
change the mindset.Or we can simply ignore the statistic that half a million
girl babies are killed every year and read the supplement on woman power that
came with India Today.

The Rational Fool writes a touching letter to his little sister who is no more. He wonders about the things which force women to abort female foetuses.

I'll pose you a hypothetical situation. Let's say a woman is raped,
and she is pregnant against her will. A staunch feminist, she decides that if it
were a female fetus, she'd carry it to full term, but she's absolutely opposed
to bringing forth a male progeny of the rapist. She wishes to have a gender test
done before she made the choice. I don't think that the State or anyone else has
any business interfering with her choice, do you? Abortion against your will is
a different matter altogether.

Mad Momma joins in.

Don't fool yourself that it's only the poor and uneducated who are
doing it. They can barely afford the sex-determining ultrasound. They throw away
new borns. The foetuses are thrown away by us. The middle class. We're the ones
who can afford the expensive ultrasound in a shady bylane. We're the ones who
have so little value for human life.

DotMom suggests a solution.

I think the only true solution to female infanticide and female
fetus abortion is to give practical solutions. Let’s start by changing the
International Adoption laws in India. It is nearly impossible for international
parents (who are not Indian citizens) to adopt an Indian child today. I know in
the US alone there are long lines at adoption agencies to get a baby. The
adoptive families will be happy to give a sum of money to the mother of the girl
child for her routine medical care, food etc, along with footing any other
medical bills and then some. Isn’t this a sensible solution?

My two cents on this topic - I do think literacy is the solution. Making education compulsory for all children and strict laws against child labor might help. But then, bribe and dowry are illegal in India. Child labor is illegal. Female foeticide and sex determination tests are also illegal. But are all these laws stopping anyone? I mean, the doctors who are performing the illegal abortions and the ultra sound technicians who are performing the illegal gender determining scans are educated, right? What good is that doing? I think the laws should be more strict on these people first. On an individual level, we all can help by sponsoring a girl child. Its a start.

Do leave your valuable suggestions, solutions or any other information on these issues in any of the above blogs or here. Let us be the change.