“IF GIRLS BECOME RARE, WHO WILL PROVIDE YOU THE BEST CARE”
Female foeticide refers to getting rid of the female fetus by surgical termination. It is a crime against women as it debars them to take birth, through various medical techniques it is used to determine the sex of the child and once this is known, they terminate the child inside the womb if it’s a girl.
The patriarchal structure of society in India and people’s preferences towards a male child is the major reason behind female foeticide. People in society think and go with the assumption that if they have a male child, it will carry forward generations, so they want a son over a daughter, grandson over granddaughter. Sometimes women themselves surrender to the illegal and immoral practice of getting their female foetus aborted due to family and social pressure.
As per the provisions of the Pre Natal-Diagnostics Techniques (PNDT) Act, it is a crime for the couples who request for abortion of the female fetus as well as for the doctors who perform it. The technique is mainly used to investigate pre-natal complications, but instead, it is misused for abortions of female fetuses in India. In some rural areas where people cannot go for sex-determination tests, female foeticide degenerates into female infanticide wherein a girl child is killed after birth by unimaginably horrible methods – she is strangulated, poisoned, dumped in garbage bins, drowned, burnt alive, or starved to death. Generally, in urban areas too, things are not different on the ground. The desire for a male child is common across households irrespective of their socio-economic conditions.
Female foeticide is nothing but the misuse of pre-natal technology which was invented to detect abnormality in the unborn child before it could actually take birth. We need to empower girls in every sense of the term – educational, social, economic, and political so that Indian families learn to practice no discrimination whether it’s a girl or boy.