Female Infanticide Should Not Be Legal

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.

Infanticide is not unique to humans. It is practiced by many mammals including some primates. The main difference between human and animal infanticide is that infanticide in humans is performed by the parent(s) of the child while in the case of animals it is usually a male suitor (Caldwell and Caldwell, 2005, p. 208). In pre-modern societies infanticide was done instead of abortions as it allowed for sexual selection, it was much more effective than pre-modern contraception, and it did not require any special skills or esoteric knowledge (Caldwell and Caldwell,2005, p. 205). Infanticide has a history as a method of population control. It is more frequent to throw away girl babies. This may be because of dowries or other cultural reasons.

The topic of abortion is quite a controversial one, many people are both for and against the motion: “Should abortion be legal in the U.S.?”. The main arguments for this topic are “You are taking a child’s life when aborting.” but others may say “Women deserve the right to their own health decisions.” Many people are also in the grey spot with this topic, many believe under certain circumstances such as medical complications, that abortion should be legal.

This particular article addresses the issue of female feticide and sex-selection abortions in Canada. Mrozek tends to focus on the Indian culture as it is a rather common practice in Indian custom. Indo-Canadians sometimes choose to abort their babies if they find out they are having a girl. Other times they can be coerced into it by elder relatives

There are approximately 353,000 children born every day. A handful of these children are born and end up leaving prodigious legacies behind... but what about the rest? Imagine… it's 2:54 in the morning and for some this would be the greatest time in their life, being that their child will be born into the world. For Jess, a soon-to-be parent,knows that having a baby will wipe away her savings in the blink of an eye. With the father of the child nowhere to be found, what kind of life would this newborn baby and mother have? What would their quality of life be? Jess knows she could give up the baby, but the thought of knowing her child is living in a world without her takes as much away from her as keeping the child would. If the clock could

Since the legalization of abortion in 1973, over 58 million babies have been terminated. This number will only continue to grow. Abortion is one of the most controversial topics out there. Two people come into play, pro-life and pro-choice supporters. If someone is pro-life, they don’t agree with abortions. However, if someone is pro-choice, they like the idea of a women being able to choose. These two people are like oil and water; they don’t mix well. Abortions should be illegal in the United States because innocent babies are being killed, babies are individuals, and babies should have rights to their own bodies.

How would you feel if your rights were questioned? Most Republicans believe abortion is ending a life and should be against the law; however, I disagree. Abortion is a right to the mother of the fetus; they mediate the future. People say it’s exterminating a human, but would they fancy the baby to reside in poverty or live off of government money? While abortion should be a last result, I don’t believe that it should be against the law to have one for the reason that the mother may have been raped, she could have a low income, or she may be too young to care for a child.

Embryos and fetuses are not independent, self-determining beings, and abortion is the termination of a pregnancy, not a baby(https://letters2president.org/letters/20919) and therefore cannot be considered humans as they are unable to be survive outside the womb. They only acquire the trait of personhood after birth no during conception.

In one year more babies are killed by abortion than Americans were killed in the Revolutionary War, Civil War, World Wars I and II, Korean, Vietnam, and Gulf Wars combined. Abortion is murder happening before they are born. There are three common forms of abortion; surgical, medical and chemical abortion. Abortion should be illegal in the United States.

One of these cultures where the Indian culture where to have a female child is seen as a burden. (2). The Indian culture is where it happens most commonly. In addition, the reason infanticide occurs is because, in these cultures, the equality between men and women is very unstable and causes mothers to kill their female infants. According to an article, laws have been put out to stop this gender-based infanticide, but it still occurs.

Infanticide is defined as the crime of killing of a child within the first 12 months of living. In some cultures, infanticide is acceptable if the parents decided to kill the child for a “good” reason. A “good” reason” to kill a newborn child would be because that child was born with a deformity, born out of wedlock, or if the children poses some type of “curse” (superstition) if they come out as twins. In different societies, this practice is standard and parents that commit this type of murder does not get criminally penalize.

In the Merriam Webster dictionary, infanticide is a term described as the act of killing an infant. Other sources describe it as the act of killing one’s own child, or killing of a child less than 12 months old. Female infanticide is more common than the killing of male offspring. More often than not, it is the mother who does the killing.

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.

In fact, there are endless similar attention grabbing headlines, just like this, and they are all true. According to the Gendercide Awareness Project, more than 50 million girls and women are missing from India’s population, they have coined the word ‘gendercide’: genocide against a specific gender group, to describe sex-selective abortion or foeticide, and say that

All around the world, an abortion is a very controversial topic and is talked about immensely. In America, when you hear people talk about an abortion, you hear them make a big deal about it. On the other hand, within the Hindu religion in India, that is a different story. The first problem that arises with regard to an abortion in India is how differently Hindu women are treated in comparison to Hindu men. As a whole, the government of India is trying to control the people and the population of the country by controlling the “female to male sex ratios.” As stated in the article Sexuality, caste, governmentality: contests over 'gender' in India by Nivedita Menon, the government is trying to cut down the population for the “development” of the country. As they are trying to do this, they are diminishing women and the rights that they have. The concern that the government should have should not mainly be what the women and their bodies and the lives that they live, “but woman as key to the stability and reproduction of society and the patriarchal family.” As stated in the article, the population rise might not be a problem caused by women. It might not be a female problem because the sex ratio was at an all time low for women as the ratio was 933 females per 1000 men in the 2001 census. One of the main reasons that the sex ratio for women has gone down is because of the widely practiced selective abortion of female foetuses.