35 female foetuses found in a well (India)

Chandigarh: Thirty-five decomposed foetuses have been recovered from a well near a hospital in Punjab, where girls are routinely aborted despite a ban on sex-determination tests, officials said on Thursday.

"A nurse has made a statement saying she has been working at the hospital for one-and-a-half months, and during this period 12 or 13 female foetuses have been destroyed," Varinder Singh Mohi, a senior government doctor said.

The couple who run the hospital in Patran, 115 km (70 miles) south of the state capital Chandigarh, had been arrested, he said. The remains had been sent for tests to determine the sex of the foetuses.

Girls are commonly aborted or killed shortly after birth in many regions of India. One recent study suggested half-a-million unborn girls may be aborted each year across the country.

Many families view boys as a better asset than girls. A handful of doctors have recently been suspended or prosecuted for carrying out selection tests.

Punjab has one of the worst female-male ratios in the country with some estimates putting it as low as 500 or 600 females to 1,000 males.

CONTINUED: http://www.ibnlive.com/news/35-female-foetuses-found-in-a-well/18160-3.html

============
This is such a disgrace. No amount of print and television campaigning is going to change the historically fucked mindset of (especially) North Indian families. so much for "world power status". fucking EXTERMINATING foetuses just because they don't sport dicks. That's the ultimate indicator of a rotten society.

on a related note, what's the stem cell lovin' chimpanzee gonna do about this?

female that this kind of thing indicates. will the chimp excuse this, as is done with FGM, as a "cultural" matter? will there be ANY outrage expressed? somehow, I doubt it.

thank you for posting this. I have taken the liberty of posting it to my own various boards.

.. all their precious boys are going to grow up unable to find a mate and procreate, because all of the women were murdered. Not only morally as wrong as possible, in a practical sense a "bad life" sentence to their sons.

It's analogous to hyper-rapacious capitalism. In the long term, everyone loses.

... abortion because the fetus is the wrong gender, yes.

Keep in mind also that in India and China, poor folks who don't have access to doctors to test for gender in utero wait until they are born to kill them. Definitely murder.

Are you pro-choice?
If yes, why should the reason a woman chooses to have an abortion matter?

Or you support a woman's right to choose only if she makes the choice according to your own moral values?

... has strings attached. Not about to get into a pointless argument about that.

some woman abort for reasons like jobs and the inconvenience of having a child.
I am sure there are people in this country that abort over the sex.

This is systematically exterminating females in favor of males. Has naught to do with the right of a woman to choose. How these families cannot see the damage they are doing to their societies is beyond me. Hasn't China's low female population, and all of the very serious issues that have come with it, taught anyone anything?

Anyone who advocates the "Stay the hell out of my womb" argument would have a difficult time criticizing another woman's decision to have an abortion, regardless of her reasons, without being viewed as a hypocrite.

But not everyone is that black or white on abortion. It doesn't have to be an all or nothing thing (where women either can't have abortions OR they can have abortions up to the 40th week if they want).

Personally, I have no problem with being pro-choice for women in the first trimester. After that my conscience starts to butt into my reasoning. I would be sympathetic to any argument stating that abortions should be outlawed after the first 15 weeks, except if the mother's health is in danger. Ideally, anyone who chooses to have an abortion should have it as soon as possible.

I don't know how it is over in India, but typically people are given the opportunity to find out the gender of their fetus at about 20 weeks. Anything earlier than that is too difficult to tell because the males testes aren't as visible. Unless these women in India are getting an amniocentesis or chromosome testing, I would assume they are also getting their results at about the midway point in their pregnancy and then aborting them. That's difficult for a lot of people to support, even if they are pro-choice. By 20 weeks the baby's organs are developed, they suck their thumb, they move, kick, swallow, play with the umbilical cord, etc. They're almost at the stage where if born they could live on their own. A lot of people would consider abortion at this stage to be killing a baby. So, I do not think it would necessarily be hypocritical for someone who has this point of view on abortion to call what is going on in India "murder."

Having said that, for a woman to have an abortion because the baby is a girl lends itself to a different argument altogether than the standard abortion debate. It is killing a fetus BECAUSE she's a girl. That opens the framework of the discussion to include the value of women in a society. Any society that intentionally kills it's females obviously doesn't place much value on them. The argument about abortion in this context is really more of an argument about women's roles and rights and what their place is in that society. Aborting them because they're female is just reinforcing the belief in that culture that women are worthless. This is wrong. It's understandable that someone would be against that behavior, regardless of how he/she feels about abortion in general.

the girl fetuses.

Highly unlikely.

You can not assume that indian society lives under the same values as ours. Our western concepts of justice and equality are not universal.
Probably even for a woman a male offspring is more valuable than a female offspring.
I've read somewhere that, in some parts of China, it is the son's duty to take care of the parents when they get old.
So, by having a son the parents are assuring their future.

law in India--that is the crime.

Is then having an abortion another crime (in India)?

in an atrociously slummy world, wouldn't abortion be the humane thing to do, really?

If it were males versus females, would any opinions here change?

You are talking about eugenics here. The idea you would not allow a baby with a certain condition to be born simply because it would be an outcast is not humane. The humane thing to do is to create a spirit of social reform so that society accepts them.

cannot wait for that.

We must solve our OWN goddamnned problems before we can change the world.

and that is a road any and all pro choice advocates should run as far away from as possible.

There'll still be a very high rate of female infant murder. That was what they did traditionally, anyhow; abortion is just a modern convenience for them. The most humane thing to do is allow these people to destroy themselves so that their customs will not blight future generations. Any attempt at intervention will just add fuel to the fire. You can't reason people out of something they didn't reason their way into.

...according to my mainland Chinese friends anyway. Since it is the law that they can only have one child, female babies are routinely killed or aborted. However, a generation of males have grown up in that country with few mates. They tell me it is the son who takes care of the elder parents in that country, not the daughter. Many of my Cninese friends are (well educated) parents of girls that come to America. They want to educate their daughters because it is a very rich dowry to be had for well educated women, and men will pay well for such a bride.

Cat In Seattle

then they are abandoned shortly afterwards. Many women abandon them in places where they hope the girls will be found and brought to the local orphanage. My daughter began life that way. She was abandoned on a doorstep in a small city in Hubei province shortly after her birth. The local orphanage knows to check it periodically and she was found before any harm came to her. They estimated her age at 1 day old when they found her based on her physical condition. Because she was healthy, she was put into the adoption stream and my husband and I were permitted to adopt her. Bethan has been with us almost 3 years now and I thank Kwan Yin and all the Gods for her presence in our lives. Well, ok, so maybe not when she is being a bratty 4 year old and sassing us back but in general.

live with His parents, but the responsibility of the household falls to her; shopping, cooking, laundry, doctor appts., medications, etc. The day to day responsibility to the in-laws is hers.

...the woman in just about every culture does all the work and the man gets all the credit. Sometimes I hate that, other times I am thinking, "No wonder men are such weak wienies and womaen have a longer lifespan."

Cat

Are all very strong, accomplished women, with at least Master's Degrees' speaking at least three languages each, one even got her pilot's license in Germany. My Brother in Law on the other hand, has been coddled for his entire life, A very kind fellow, and a good heart, yet he knew he would inherit and be set. Once the daughters marry and move into their In-Laws house, or their own, they are no longer really seen as a part of their own family, but instead, as a part of the husbands. Eventually, the wife will become the de facto head of the house, but not until the passing of the husbands parents.

You are both correct, that the culture strongly favors the male, and it does make the women stronger. Having just returned from a visit overseas with the family I was reminded of all this once again, though it was a wonderful time.

It's not wise to screw with mother nature. That'll probably be what saves us from China taking over the world. Either that or they will be so sexually frustrated they will start blowing people up for no reason...er-wait, Bush all ready claimed dibs on that, right?

Let's see, they're outsourcing our jobs to India, but Indian men will be looking for wives due to a shortage. Where or where are they going to go?

where the one family one child policy has led to female infanticide. Now the female to male ratio is so bad young men can't find wives. So what do they do? Young women are literally kidnapped off the streets in their home towns and villages and married by force to men they don't even know.

Bear with me a moment while I draw what might seem at first to be a distant parallel. In the US, there is a severe shortage of nurses. In any other field, such a shortage would lead to a sellers' market, where nurses, being so much in demand, could get higher salaries, better benefits, improved working conditions. But as nursing is primarily a female profession, what happens instead is that you end up with understaffed shifts, so that the nurses that are on duty have to handle more than is humanly possible and work killing hours until they burn out and give up. In some hospitals, non-nursing staff are trained to perform certain nursing duties. Some years ago I knew an orderly at our local hospital who was trained to draw blood because there weren't enough nurses to do it all. Inevitably, patient care is compromised, no matter how hard the nurses try to maintain the quality of care. The one benefit to the nurses of the shortage that I have seen is that a nurse can pretty much walk into a job anywhere she goes in the country.

Now, back to the original point. In a society where there just are not enough women to go around, you would think that would make women more important, give them some social clout. But in fact what it does is make them, like oil, and increasingly scarce and valuable commodity. Instead of getting some social power from their scarcity and value, they are simply "stolen," raped and enslaved as captured brides.

..."Instead of getting some social power from their scarcity and value, they are simply "stolen," raped and enslaved as captured brides."

In most cultures, including ours, women are still social, public property. Here is where all the fundamentalist talk of "morality" breaks down. There is no morality, no humanity, in this.

with out women, there can be no men.

cannot attain brides because of the paucity of females due to sex selection prenatally. There will be kidnappings, battles, maybe wars due to this societal phenomenon.

called "Matrubhumi" (Motherland). Its about the plight of a girl in a village in a world where there are few women. The brutality shown towards this girl was so graphic the movie never released in India. I believe you can find prints of it in the UK and the USA.

women reduced to becoming material commodities and marginalized as such. Probably will be assigned a price value by their fathers due to their scarcity.

... it will all work out.

Kill female babies, creating population imbalance.
Females become more valuable, creating production demand.
Kill male babies due to lesser worth.

Lather, rinse, repeat. It's just the natural business cycle.

(This message brought to you by Dow Chemical and Fox News.)

r-old women)--No brothers or sisters. It just struck me that it has been going on for so long. She was from China--one kid per couple policy.

It's going to lead to a LOT of very frustrated, pissed-off Indian men.

One woman with mulitple husbands.

:rofl:

It's multiple husbands sharing one wife.

In other words, she does not have the power to choose; she becomes the property of both of them. Double the un-fun.

If we think it's bad enough that parents sell a daughter to the highest bidder, just think how much money they can make selling her to two or three?

I actually have very little problem with abortion for the sake of choosing the sex of the born child. What I have a major problem with is a culture that so devalues the female. Banning sex-choice abortions isn't going to fix the problem; challenging and changing the anti-woman culture will, but it's a lot tougher job.


Tansy Gold

Most men have too much ego to share a woman. Especially men in countries like that. (Where women are oppressed.) I lived in Egypt for a year and the men there used to tease my husband about getting a second wife. I told those men I was going to get a second husband and you should have seen their heads explode! :)

Send the Christian Right. They have a new mission. Bringing Christianity to India. <sarcasm>

:popcorn:

They're not very upfront about it either. If an organization has to lie to do mission work,they don't belong there.

American busybodies are going to have a field day with this. *sniff* Can you smell that? It's righteous indignation brewing in the air already.

Pass me some of that... :popcorn:

for a very, very long time. since before British rule. Catholics, Baptists, Methodists. There are Christian Missions everywhere. Actually there are lots of Christian Indians, it's just a small % of the total population.

And the other .01% are young babies yet to be baptized.

surprised by the Christians I met working there. I met a 70 year old nurse from Canada who had been there for 40 years working with the poor. I stayed at a Baptist Guest House in Madras (not because I'm a Baptist but because I had made friends with the ministers son who was a hippie) and was stunned about how committed the people were to helping as opposed to proselytizing. Of course, the real mission is to convert them all but, in India, they're fighting a loosing battle.

Invade them and kill them?

Time will tell & the societies that choose to eliminate most females from a generation will deal with the results.

century, the white tribes killed off most of their male breeding stock in two world wars?
How did we fair?

I was just reading about a third of the dead in Lenanon were children under 12?
Let's face it -- we don't REALLY care about 'third world babies'; let alone their fetus...this is more a self-righteous 'they be savages' propaganda...the basic story doesn't ring true...and the comments of the OP are quite bigoted...it's a problem all over India...not just the North.

Worked so well in Iraq! :sarcasm:

A woman here in the US may have an abortion because she discovers her child is Downs, or has some other birth defect and she does not feel she can handle that situation (for whatever reason)...she she aborts.

A couple in India may abort because culturally because there is extreme pressure to produce a son.

I just saw a film called Leila (Iranian film I rented through netflix)...and it was the story of a newly married couple who discovers that the wife is infertile and the stress her mother in law puts her under to let her husband take another wife in order to produce a son...it was very eye opening...and it was so sad...in so many ways....cultural traditions can be cruel and unjust...

sometimes I wanna talk about these great movies I have rented...ones that are not blockbusters but deal with the human drama...

that movie was so sad and I couldn't help but notice that it was structured to make her acquiescence look like a great idea with positive results....it was just so sad.

(European decendants)

Boys are allow to be free while women are expected to wait on them hand and foot. The men get the best of the meat. They be grow up to be strong. To do what I don't know. It must be something about having more testosterone around the house. :shrug:

Message removed by moderator. Click here to review the message board rules.

:puke:

...government fiat.

in India for more than 20 years, but it has not solved the problem. It will take a change in attitude of the society.

BTW, this problem is more acute in NW India, and Tamil Nadu state. Many states in India do not suffer from this problem. It is a culturally rooted problem.

The same thing happens in the US everyday.....This is not the chimp's business - he is too busy invading other countries, killing their leaders and converting them to Christianity...

uncompromisingly pro-choice, it must be emphasized that the mothers who did this had every right to act as they did. It was their choice. We may not like the reason for their choice (I don't), but it wasn't our choice to make it was theirs. No 'girls' or 'human beings' were harmed. Foetuses were aborted.

socitey.

It's more than likely the people deciding girls aren't worth as much as boys, are men.

with India.

Am sure the favoritism of males over females being born was what made it all right with * to do that :sarcasm:

...yeah, right...as if Chimpy McFuckwad actually has a clue about any country's culture, whether positive or negative.

Oh, yeah! McFuckwad hasn't a clue where any country is located, and thinks Texas is a country because of the signs that say: Texas is Bush Country.


What a shame that we have people at the helm of our nation who really don't give a flying fuck about any of this female extermination :grrr:

(Off the subject ,but)
Sticking dead fetuses in a Well (rot, stench, disease) so it seeps into other drinking water?

Ugh! Nasty!:puke:

There was a rash of that around the US Mexico border a few years back. As the former designated retreive-the-drowned rat/snake/whatever from our 25 foot hand dug well, I said - the perfect punishment for whoever would do that is make them clean it out, or at the very least drink and bathe in the water for a year. :puke: :mad:

I'd be worried to drink out of any well anymore by the sounds of it all!

:puke:

dear boys.... China is finding this out the hard way..there are millions of unhappy frustrated young men who cannot find women to marry them.. It appears that lots of females have figured out that they can hold out for a well-to-do young man, and they have no desire to marry a many who is not wealthy..

Oh well...there's always the military life :scared:

The way women are perceived and treated is the problem.I can't blame any woman who doesn't want to bring a child into this world who will be treated like an object...possibly forced to labor or even prostitution.

This online pamphlet offers insight into the lives of women in India.
http://www.un.org.in/wii.htm

but legislation won't stop this.

The Indian government has legislation on the books, but this kind of stuff isn't really enforced on a local level. There was an article in an Indian online magazine about this phenomena and a woman that was trying to educate the people in of the areas where this was especially problematic. Unfortunately, she was not respected by many in the community.

The mentality in these places has to change. If they don't, they will doom themselves.

With a lot of men, with no women around, the men will get pissed and eventually kill themselves - or in India and China's case - likely fight each other, resulting in the deaths of many males.

Maybe that's karma.

I recall reading a study that looked at the violence and crime rates of various towns and cities in the U.S. during the 1800's. And the strongest correlation had to do with the ratio of males to females. The higher the percentage of women there are in a society, the lower the crime rate.

A lot of unattached males is just not a good thing.

I am so fucking sick of people not having this option, especially in impoverished countries.

...Indian culture? They WANT a child, but they want it to be a male child. The female fetuses aren't discarded because the children aren't wanted, they're discarded because they're not the desired kind of child.

have nothing to do with this? I disagree. These families are not having just ONE child.

I will stand by my belief, if you give them a choice many will use birth control.

This is NOT a birth control issue. It is a societal issue where, in that particular culture, male babies are desired over female babies. No family wants the financial obligation of coming up with a dowry (I'm assuming you really don't know very much about Indian culture).

It has nothing to do with birth control.

Aborting females sounds more like a male decision to me than a female decision.

I'm for abortion only when it's the WOMANS choice. And Yes, I see this isn't really an abortion (womens rights to abort), issue.

The thing I'm NOT seeing about it is womens rights in india. Sounds to me like that patriarchial socitey is killing women because they don't think they're worth as much as men. Sort of completely anti womens rights imo.

How is it going to be if the women decides to abort all her sons too? Think her husband will mind?

Some how I don't think the women are having much/any say over this.

it's not just this, but the caste system and some other things. legally , these things are outlawed. but in certain areas they still continue. it's just part of the culture.

not sure what they can do. maybe if they spend more on educating everyone and giving them more opportunities. all those stories you hear about some Indians doing well. these people have opportunities to rise. the girls can get jobs and the family doesn't feel as much pressure to marry her off to some guy to take care of her as she will do it on her own.

but many people don't have this. they are stuck in some shitty system.

i think the key is education plus women's rights.