Female Foeticide And Its Effects On Women

In this short video and article on the topic of gendercide, reporter Elizabeth Vargas travels to India to found out from the people of India personally why there is such a shortage of females. She discovered that although aborting a fetus of a female child is illegal because of the shortage of females, families still continue to abort them because they don't want the burden that the baby girls brings. Vargas also discovered that illegal sex determination clinics can be found just about on every street. Men and their families also the wives to have sex determination tests and abort the baby if it’s female.

Most girls as young as ten years were viewed as adults and they were married off to rich men without their consent. Despite their tender age, they were expected to bear children for the husband. Physiologically and psychologically the young girls were not prepared. This made childbirth a dangerous process. It was estimated that 20% of girls giving birth died during childbirth (Bitel 3).

In the mid-1980's, according to Chinese government statistics, birth control surgeries such as abortions, sterilizations, and IUD insertions, were running at a rate of 30 million a year. (Mosher 50) Numbers for more recent years are unavailable; the Chinese government, embarrassed by reports of coercion and female infanticide, has refused to release them. Many, if not most, of these operations are performed on women whose "consent" has been wrung out of them by threats and punishments. (Mosher 50) When questions are asked of the whereabouts of the 1.7 million female babies that fail to show up in birth statistics each year, there are disturbing explanations. (Richards 6)

"Raising a daughter is like watering your neighbors’ garden.” That quote from a Hindu proverb.is referring to is how in some cultures when a daughter is old enough to be married, she leaves that family and joins her husbands'. So, raising a daughter in those cultures is seen as helping another family. Unlike females when a son is born he will stay and take care of the parents as they age. This son preference can lead to some countries committing gendercide. The act of gendercide is the mass killing of people because of their sex. Gendercide is a horrid trend that is due to the son preferences of many countries. Parents in Countries such as china and India have been killing there daughters. In India 25 percent of girls die before they can reach puberty. Also, 200 million women are missing because of being killed at a young age. There are many cultural causes of gendercide. The first is that boy babies are valued far more then female babies. Male children can carry on the family name, take care the parents when they get old and are less "expensive" to raise. In India there is a dowry system where in order for a woman to be married, the bride’s family must give gifts of money, land, livestock or other expensive items. This can put I strain on poorer families who cannot afford to pay a dowry or richer families who do not want to spend that type of money. So , when they have a girl child they either get an abortion or kill the child to save money. There was a Indian mother that

The severity to which women are being punished is why I feel this topic is important. Not only are these prosecutions a rising trend, but also because the increase in preventable maternal deaths throughout the world needs to continue

This brings about many ethical questions and moral concerns. The practice that likely incites the most controversy in selective abortion is sex selective reduction. As technology has advanced, the availability of ultrasound technology has provided practitioners with the ability to identify many fetal characteristics, one of which is gender (Higgins, 2016). Sex-selective reduction mirrors the practice of so called “gendercide” that occurs in countries such as China and India. In these countries sex selective abortion is used to create a population that is predominantly male. To American’s these methods may seem inhumane, and there are many organizations in the US and around the world attempting to stop gender specific abortion. What many Americans probably do not realize is these practices occur in the United States as well, and they have for a long time. While these methods are considered legal in the United States, the ethical implications of aborting fetuses based on sex creates an entirely new concern. The practice of selective abortion in general has created a number of ethical questions for society, and those practicing in the medical

Violence and cruelty directed at women starts from a very young age and it happens because certain cultures and governments allow it to exist and thrive within their population. Within the text, Steinem reveals that, “...child marriage contributes to the fact that the biggest cause of death among teenage girls worldwide is pregnancy and childbirth” (Steinem). Child marriage is still remarkably prominent in many cultures still to this day. These young adolescent bodies are being forced to carry a child the second they get their period and so many of these young girls die from this cultural normalcy. This illustrates why radical feminism is still essential to completely eradicate this kind of subtle brutality against developing girls. Often the cruelty can start even earlier than that with the second thier parents find out they are having a baby girl. Thanks to the ever growing baby boy preference, female fetuses are getting aborted more and more often. If the baby girl is already born they are often neglected, left to

Over several centuries and in different cultures, there is a rich history of women helping each other to abort.

In Pakistan, thousands of women are dying each year because they are being accused of dishonoring their families. “The reason is rooted in sexual inequality in such countries,” Terence McCoy insists. Individuals are killing just women, and a genocide is not technically being committed because sex is not protected under the UN’s definition. Not only should the UN change its definition of genocide to include sex, but also it should change its definition to include age.

That is almost thirty-five percent of all births. Along with all of the common issues, there are new ones arising. For example, in Afghanistan there has been an increase in sales of over-the-counter oxytocin which is an injectable hormone that can be used to stop postpartum bleeding and speed up labor but can be deadly if given incorrectly. Finally, after millions of deaths and little government action, the issue of maternal mortality is once and for all attracting attention. In July, at the G-8 summit of industrialized nations in Hokkaido, Japan, maternal deaths were acknowledged as an important obstacle to development for the first time. It paid off and there has been progress in multiple poor countries. For example, in Honduras maternal mortality rates dropped by about fifty percent after rural clinics were opened and thousands of midwives were trained. In the Indian states of Assam, Madhya Pradesh, and Orissa pregnant women were given financial assistance. In Sierra Leone there were even fines set if a woman didn’t give birth in a

Globally, there are over 200,000,000 missing females in this world (It’s a Girl). The number of females missing is so massive that this genocide is now dubbed the gendercide. 80 percent of the 200 million missing females are from two countries, one of them being China (Lee 20). For centuries parents have been trying to choose the sex of their children but the world had never seen anything quite like this genocide ever before. (Sandel 127). This epidemic is so astounding and so large that “For each decade in the past century, more girls were killed than the sum total of all those who died in genocides of the entire century” (Lee 19). The large sum of Chinese females missing is likely due to the traditions of Chinese culture, ultrasound

“In India pre-natal sex selection and infanticide accounted for the pre-natal termination and death of half a million girls per year over the last 20 years. In the Republic of Korea, 30 percent of pregnancies identified as female fetuses were terminated. Contrastingly, over 90 percent of pregnancies identified as male fetuses resulted in normal birth. According to China's 2000 census, the ratio of newborn girls to boys was 100:119. The biological standard is 100:103.3” (Scott, 1-3) All around the world, women are persecuted and seen as the weaker sex. Female life is not respected in some places on earth, instead seen as useless. Around the world, girls today experience many of the same problems their ancestors did hundreds of years ago. Women can’t vote in several countries around the world or make basic choices without their husbands. Education, limited in hundreds of countries, leaves girls once again under

India’s statistics are similar. According to the BBC “In 1961, for every 1,000 boys under the age of seven, there were 976 girls. Today, the figure has dropped to a dismal 914 girls. Although the number of women overall is improving (due to factors such as life expectancy), India's ratio of young girls to boys is one of the worst in the world after China. Many factors come into play to explain this: infanticide, abuse and neglect of girl children. But campaigners say the decline is largely due to the increased availability of antenatal sex screening, and they talk of a genocide”.

Female infanticide has been accepted for centuries in many countries, and is more prominent in India and China than in any other countries around the world. It is illegal in India, however it is reported by Unicef that up to 50 million girls and women are “missing” in India as a result of systemic sex discrimination.

It is regrettable that female infanticide and foeticide are rapidly decreasing the female population throughout India. The main factors that is responsible for the increase in the incidence of female infanticide and foeticide is the low status of women, son preference, and the practice of dowry across all casts groups.