Sex-selective abortion continues in India despite efforts to stop it

Sex-selective abortion schemes are continuing to grow in India, even as government officials try to shut them down.

Key Takeaways:

• Authorities across India are trying to shut down illegal sex-selective abortion rackets, which are continuing to flourish.

• While abortion is legal in India, sex-selective abortion is not.

• A culture preference for sons continues to lead to a gendercide against girls.

The Details:

According to Frontline, authorities in India have been trying to shut down illegal sex-selective abortion schemes, but with little success.

In September, the health department in Karnataka intervened when it was discovered that a 30-year-old woman was trying to cross the state border for an ultrasound to find out if her preborn child would be a girl; as she already had three daughters, she planned to have an abortion if she wasn't carrying a son. Officials from the two states, Karnataka and Andhra Pradesh, worked to dismantle what they said was an illegal sex-selective abortion racket.

Another state, Haryana, was found to have similar networks in place; this scheme spread across two states, Haryana and Uttar Pradesh. A raid in Ahmedabad found a radiologist and nurse performing ultrasounds, followed by sex-selective abortions in bathhouses and patients' homes.

Even in Delhi, the sex ratio has begun to plummet again, as sex-selective abortion continues to take place.

The Supreme Court has since given approval to state authorities to better implement enforcement of the Pre-Conception and Pre-Natal Diagnostic Techniques (PCPNDT) Act, which bans sex-selective abortion and was passed in 1994. The court noted that past cases had not been prosecuted properly, allowing the gendercide to continue, with conviction rates far too low to make an impact.

Across numerous states in India, sex-selective abortion rackets have moved to remain ahead of the law, fleeing to smaller villages across state borders to avoid detection, while the bigger problem remains cultural; Indian parents still cling to a cultural preference for sons.

As women’s rights activist Varsha Deshpande explained, the problem is much bigger than just shutting down the schemes whenever they pop up; multiple laws are being violated, with little-to-no action taken:

"The foetus gets selected as a boy or a girl, and then eliminated using abortion drugs that are illegally sold across India. These drugs are supposed to be restricted, unlike condoms and family planning pills that you can buy over the counter, yet you can buy them in every market.

The problem is not one law, it’s the violation of all three.”

Dr Neelam Singh, a gynaecologist and founder of Vatsalya, a Uttar Pradesh-based NGO working for women’s and children’s health, said the rise of in vitro fertilization (IVF) has also made the issue become more complicated, as couples are using IVF to screen out female embryos — and yet, the government has been slow to act.

“Earlier, people went abroad, to Thailand or Indonesia, for sex selection packages. Now, even IVF clinics in India are suspected of selecting embryos by sex,” she said. “There was even a parliamentary question last year about the sex ratio of IVF births, but no data exists. The Ministry needs to bring IVF centres within the ambit of the PCPNDT Act.”

Zoom In:

The cultural preference for sons has deep roots in India, having gradually evolved over time throughout the country's history, but daughters weren't necessarily devalued until medieval India, when caste practices became more rigid, along with inheritance laws put into place that excluded daughters, and dowries that made daughters a financial liability. British colonial laws later codified many of these practices into law, including excluding women from having property rights.

While many of these practices are technically no longer legal, they persist. Dowries, for example, are still paid, even though they are not supposed to be permitted. Sons are still the ones who inherit, leaving daughters sidelined, and are the ones who are expected to carry on the family name.

Population control policies have further exacerbated the issue, with forced sterilization becoming widespread in the 1970s. Despite the horrors of that scheme, many are calling for population control policies to be implemented in India yet again.

Why It Matters:

As in China, the cultural preference for sons in India has led to widespread gendercide.

An estimated 13.5 million girls have been killed in sex-selective abortions from 1987 to 2016, with women subjected to mass sterilization camps or pressured into having needless hysterectomies. It is believed that, without ultrasounds allowing couples to find out the gender of their preborn children from the 1970s to today, there would be approximately 63 million more women and girls alive in India.

This has led to skewed sex ratios; according to the United Nations Population Fund, the male-to-female ratio at birth is nearly 114 to 100. Without enough women, sex trafficking and other abuses have become widespread, and fertility rates are plummeting.

The Bottom Line:

Gendercide is a major problem, and it continues to exist around the globe, despite what abortion activists often claim. It should never be acceptable to condemn someone to death simply because they are the "wrong" gender, but sadly, this is the reality in far too many countries.