India’s been on my mind a lot recently. This time last year I was making plans to visit India as one of a tem of 9 Australians. We landed in Delhi on the 19th of February, 2005.
The trip was amazing. We cycled through Delhi streets and then from Delhi to Chandigarh. Travelling on Indian roads is interesting at any time but doing it on a bicycle has its own challenges.
The message we spread while travelling with those from the Bible Society of India was that of ‘Caring for the Girl Child’. We were helping the locals highlight the very real issue of gender imbalance in some parts of India. We certainly didn’t want to be seen as westerners visiting another nation for a few weeks and telling them how to run things so we simply supported the message the locals wanted to highlight in the community and the media.
We were amazed to hear that one of the things they wanted to tell pregnant mothers was not to have ultrasounds. “Surely that’s just basic health care”, we thought until the realisation hit home that the reason behind many ultrasounds in India is to detect the gender of the unborn child. In many cases, if the child is found to be a girl, the baby will be aborted.
I noticed today that a report has been released which estimates that around 10 million female foetuses may have been aborted in India over the past two decades because of ultrasound sex screening and a traditional preference for boys. When I look into the beautiful faces of some of the girls in India, like those above from a Delhi slum, I just can’t imagine ending their lives even before they begin. You can read some of the findings from the report here courtesy of News.com.au.
One of the surprising findings is that the practice seems to be far more prominent amongst educated women. Maybe that’s because educated women have greater access to ultrasounds.
The news report says, “They found that in cases where the preceding child was a girl, the gender ratio for a second birth was just 759 girls to 1000 boys.
And when the two previous children were girls, this ratio fell even further, to 719 girls to 1000 boys.”
One of the authors of the report went on to say, “We conservatively estimate that prenatal sex determination and selective abortion accounts for 0.5 million missing girls yearly.”
It breaks my heart to hear what’s going on in India. It breaks my heart even more to know that in the western world we don’t practice ‘selective abortion’. Over here, when it comes to abortion, it doesn’t matter if the unborn child is a girl or a boy.
Posted by Rodney Olsen
Technorati Tags: India – Abortion – Ultrasound
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Wow. That is so disturbing. Thank you for informing me of these atrocities.