New Delhi: India terminated 10 million daughters in the past 20 years. This shocking reality has been uncovered by a study done by medical journal Lancet, which also reveals that female foeticide was not a phenomenon restricted to rural India.
Lancet published the findings of a team of scientists, who analysed female fertility figures from a national survey of six million people in India and found that there were about half a million fewer girls born in the country in 1997 than expected.
The scientists said selective abortion of female foetuses is the most plausible explanation for the skewed sex ratio.
"We conservatively estimate that prenatal sex determination and selective abortion account for 0.5 million missing girls yearly," Dr Prabhat Jha of the University of Toronto and the head of the research team said,
"If this practice has been common for most of the past two decades since access to ultrasound become widespread, then a figure of 10 million missing female births would not be unreasonable," he added.
The figures support estimates by the Indian Medical Association, which has said five million female foetuses are killed in India each year.
South Delhi: Big cars, big names, bigger secrets
CNN-IBN found out that affluent south Delhi, too, has some terrifying statistics.
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Apart from the big cars, big markets and big buyers, South Delhi also has some big and shocking figures that show the skewed sex ratio in the Capital. There are only 762 girls for every 1,000 boys and one in every four girls gets aborted.
“It's all about the economics. Doctors charge some money for the ultrasound and then another sum for the abortion. Many times, they even say the baby is a girl to make money. But, this will continue as long as there is a demand. I routinely get people asking me to tell them if they're having a girl or boy,” RC Patnaik, Radiologist at an ultrasound center, revealed.
Even if the ultrasound machines aren’t used to determine the sex of a baby, there are several other technologies that are used.
Patnaik says that a new kit in the US allows mothers to find out the sex of their baby through blood or urine samples.
Many young mothers CNN-IBN spoke to, had no problem wondering whether to buy pink or blue clothes for their babies as they already knew whether their unborn baby is a boy or a girl. Sex determination is punishable by the law, but it hasn't stopped some of South Delhi's well-established gynecologists.
The process is discreet as the doctors usually begin to refer to the baby by their gender, or ask parents to buy clothes of a certain colour.
Wealth and high education doesn't make a difference to whether a woman is likely to abort her foetus or not. A basic study by the CMAI (Christian Medical Association of India) shows this.
“Our study shows that even if a woman is highly educated and from a prosperous family, it doesn't change how likely she is to have an abortion. The only thing that could influence such a decision is the woman's employment status,” Joe Varghese, Researcher, CMAI, says.
In posh South Delhi where there are only one or two kids per family, an ultrasound helps custom order the right gender. Expecting parents can pick the gender of their baby, just as they would pick their winter clothes.
(with inputs from Hemangini Gupta)
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