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Real Answers™
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Copyright: ©2008 Rusty Wright and Meg Korpi
600 words

INDIA'S MISSING GIRLS AND THE RIGHT TO CHOOSE

By: Rusty Wright and Meg Korpi

Last summer, a farmer in southern India discovered a tiny human hand poking from the ground.  A two-day-old baby girl had been buried alive.  The reason?  Much of Indian culture favors males over females, sometimes brutally so. 

Against odds, this baby survived.  Her grandfather confessed to attempting murder because his family already had too many females; keeping this one would be too costly.

Award-winning filmmaker Ashok Prasad says this wasn’t an isolated incident on the subcontinent.  Prasad spoke recently at the US premiere of his BBC documentary “India’s Missing Girls” at Stanford University. 

Anti-female bias affects Indians rich and poor.  Males can perpetuate the family name, bring wealth, and care for elderly parents.  A female’s family typically must pay a huge wedding dowry, often seriously depleting their resources.  A popular Hindi aphorism: "Having a girl is to plant a seed in someone else's garden."

Social and financial pressures bring alarming rates of female infanticide and feticide (termination of a fetus).   When boys are born, families celebrate.  When girls are born, mourning or murder can result.  Since ultrasound allows determination of fetal gender, many choose to abort the females. 

Though abortion is legal in India, sex-selective abortion is not.  Indian law prohibits sonographers from revealing fetal gender, but de jure often is not de facto.  Ultrasound clinics proliferate.  UN figures estimate 750,000 aborted females annually in India.  Huge gender disparity results; many men cannot find wives.

While the motivation to avoid daughters relates to cost, the decision is often economic choice rather than necessity.  Higher rates of gender disparity occur in wealthy communities.

“India’s Missing Girls” highlights the work of Sandhya Reddy, who runs a children’s home, cares for abandoned kids, and tries to persuade mothers to keep their daughters or female fetuses.  This angel of mercy brings love, care and opportunity to society’s young rejects.

The documentary includes brief, grisly footage of terminated female fetuses being lifted from a well belonging to an ultrasound clinic that performed illegal sex-selective abortions.  After the discovery, outraged women’s groups protested in the streets; several such clinics were closed down.

“India’s Missing Girl’s” poignantly depicts where devaluing women can lead.  The Stanford screening’s sponsors included feminist and women’s organizations, but feminists and nonfeminists, liberals and conservatives alike will be moved.  An abbreviated 29-minute version of the film on YouTube is worth watching, even if only the first 10-minute segment.

To Western sensibilities, killing babies and terminating fetuses solely because of gender is abhorrent, infuriating.  It offends one’s sense of equality and fairness.  But such offense raises troubling questions.  No Hitler masterminds this mass female infanticide/feticide.  It results from many personal reproductive choices.

The dilemma: Does favoring a woman’s right to choose logically imply that one supports her right to terminate a fetus simply because it is female?  

Opposing female feticide seems to ascribe value to the female fetus.  Is that value inherent because the fetus is female, human, or potentially human?  If so, wouldn’t equality require that we ascribe similar value to the male fetus? 

Or is fetal value merely economic—negative for Indian females, positive for males? Or is it for perceived common good—e.g., to ensure female influence in society...or sufficient brides?

The issue of fetal value was addressed in King David’s age-old Psalm of gratitude to the One he felt gave him value:  “You made all the delicate, inner parts of my body and knit me together in my mother’s womb.  Thank you for making me so wonderfully complex!”

Inherently valuable? Economically consequential? Societally necessary? Wonderfully complex? Regardless, the quandary remains: Can opposition to female feticide be reconciled with supporting reproductive choice?

Rusty Wright (B.S. psychology, Duke; M.Th. Oxford) is an author and lecturer with Probe.org who has spoken on six continents. 

Meg Korpi (Ph.D. Stanford) is a research scientist who studies character development, social-emotional learning and ethical decision-making. She also spent a decade conducting sex education research for ETR Associates.

"Real Answers™" furnished courtesy of The Amy Foundation Internet Syndicate. To contact the author or The Amy Foundation, write or E-mail to: P. O. Box 16091, Lansing, MI 48901-6091; amyfoundtn@aol.com

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