On BBC - ten million female fetus deaths in India in the last 20 years

These numbers always totally amaze me.

Families want boys. Boys take care of their parents in these cultures. And most people don't have enough money to support many children - so they simply abort any females.

I can certainly understand their logic. But this is genocide on an amazing scale.

And then they end up like China has - the men have no one to marry. The women who survived then have to survive even worse treatment at the hands of the men. They are kidnapped and live the lives of virtual slaves - some even have their hamstrings cut so they can't run away.

I have always felt so grateful that I was born in the US.

Fetuses are not people. You need a cerebrum to be a person. As long as they are being aborted prior to the third trimester there is no person present as there is no cerebrum present.

Now the morality of engineering gender may have some issues. But its not genocide.

You know, techically they may not be considered a "person" but when its ten million and all of the same sex to me its genocide of an entire gender.

This is a whole different thing going on.

And there may even be cases where a person is actually being killed if the abortions occur late enough. But I suspect the moral issue hinges on engineering of society rather than on the actual killing or terminating itself.

and it is going to sound snarky, but it isn't. Let's say a decree came forth form who knows where or what or whatever, in some horrible sci-fi world, that every (just choosing a race at random here) Japanese fetus had to be aborted. Would the plan to eliminate a specific race via abortion be genocide, in your view?

I could have looked up "genocide" for a better definition, but your post made me think so I thought I'd open that issue up. Not try to hijack the thread.

Interested in your thoughts...

obviously the Indians are not choosing to eliminate women from their race completely.

I would call it immoral. But it is not the direct killing of people.

It seems to me that the real problem here is women's rights.

rock and hard place. If they do it long enough, they will never have to do it again. Ever.

Unfortunately it is clear that there is an economic advantage to having male children in this society. So there are going to be people that try to take advantage of this. There is nothing new under the sun concerning this. The only bright spot is they are not waiting until the child is born before they decide to do away with it as has been done historically.

The solution would seem to be in addressing equal rights and more specifically at addressing the economic disparity that drives such a condition in the first place.

Female infanticide is also common in countries where selective female abortion is widespread, and India is one of the worst offenders in that area. I suppose I could look up the statistics, but quite frankly I don't have the stomach for it.

No thats not true. I have studied enough psychology to know how it happens. Its just beyond my awareness level. I cannot imagine myself doing anything remotely like it. It is barbaric to my thinking.

cultures. They burned women alive on funeral pyres until the turn of the last century and it still goes on in remote areas.

... check your own position on abortion.
Just a thought.

US because males were favored by all couples I think it would change the argument.

I've had an abortion. Still, this is a little different when it's the systematic ridding of one sex.

Lee

Not the same argument.

...but if killing fetuses of ANY sex in an abortion situation is OK because it's a woman's "choice." ????
Really, I'm NOT trying to start a fight, I'm just trying to figure this out. I'm not some anti-choice churchbot, either. I believe in abortion rights.

It is societal pressure that drives this. Choice isn't an option for these women. Their actions are dictated to them by their husbands and by society.

When the actual PURPOSE is misogyny.
Lee

This is not about choice--it is about selective gendercide.

So you could say this is progress, I suppose. The glass is half-full?

Female newborns are simply suffocated and discarded in the trash.

What a tricky little subject abortion is!

This is yet another example of how tough it is to take any one side on the abortion issue. Shades of grey overlapping shades of grey on top of more shades of grey....

All of a sudden, the reasoning behind these abortions comes into question while in other cases, the pro choice stance is not supposed to take any reason into consideration.

Maybe some things are just impossible to reconcile...

Still has to do with a woman's choice. Do you REALLY think all these women WANT to abort their daughters? Please. ...and individual choice is different than carrying out a misogynist campaign to kill most women...except the FEW you keep around for breeding stock.

Yes, the reason does matter. Individual choice as opposed to a social program of wiping out women.
Lee

but it occurs in rural areas where health care is few and far between and I hardly think they keep records of it.

"I have always felt so grateful that I was born in the US."

My husband is grateful he was born in India. So are his three sisters. Save the feigned horror for what's happening in Gitmo.

By the way--Scooter's off to jail and we're getting posts about this and the Jehovah's Witnesses. Seems odd...

The same way they are in China. When the adult male to adult female ratio is that far off you get men without mates.

doesn't mean it isn't cruelly unjust. There is so much unrecoverable, potential good being killed that it makes the war, and everything else we here at DU worry about, pale in comparison.

It's a tool for population control.

polyandry would be a logical practice, at least in theory. I think it would be a disaster, in reality.

and if it is a WOMAN'S choice to abort the female, then so be it.
HOWEVER, if that "CHOICE" is unduly influenced by society or by her husband, then it is not choice at all.
I lay this out for those who are attempting to insert a slippery slope on choice here.
What is happening in India IS female infanticide.
http://www.gendercide.org/case_infanticide.html
>>>>snip
India is also the heartland of sex-selective abortion. Amniocentesis was introduced in 1974 "to ascertain birth defects in a sample population," but "was quickly appropriated by medical entrepreneurs. A spate of sex-selective abortions followed." (Karlekar, "The girl child in India.") Karlekar points out that "those women who undergo sex determination tests and abort on knowing that the foetus is female are actively taking a decision against equality and the right to life for girls. In many cases, of course, the women are not independent agents but merely victims of a dominant family ideology based on preference for male children."

Dahlburg notes that "In Jaipur, capital of the western state of Rajasthan, prenatal sex determination tests result in an estimated 3,500 abortions of female fetuses annually," according to a medical-college study. (Dahlburg, "Where killing baby girls 'is no big sin'.") Most strikingly, according to UNICEF, "A report from Bombay in 1984 on abortions after prenatal sex determination stated that 7,999 out of 8,000 of the aborted fetuses were females. Sex determination has become a lucrative business." (Zeng Yi et al., "Causes and Implications of the Recent Increase in the Reported Sex Ratio at Birth in China," Population and Development Review, 19: 2 , p. 297.)

so that female fetuses are routinely aborted and female babies killed.

What are you thinking?!?!?!

When people want to blame abortion for the problem (as a news story from Faux News - that was in LBN - did)

When people want to pretend this is somehow a sticky wicket for pro-choicers.

To even suggest that the root cause might be the sexism and the discrimination of women.. the idea that men are somehow better than women....in cultures that place more value on the life of a male

Oh, stop! Stop!

I've been wanting to smack people all day about this. Thank you, Horse with no Name - for pointing the obvious out (at least I thought it should have been obvious)

the detractors mention only abortion.:)

or maybe it just never dawns on them

So they could determine the sex of the fetus. Very sad.

Feminists on a major scale. The gravamen of the problem seems to be male supremacy itself.

Too bad the US never sees that as a viable export - or that undercover CIA operations never seem to start parties like that. No, let's bring them "democracy" by bombing them. If they have oil.

it's a fucking tragedy, it's a disgrace! but you cant combat this by simply condemning it, you know?

.... but it's a subject too long neglected.

Here are two excerpts from: http://www.gendercide.org/case_infanticide.html

Focus (1): India

As John-Thor Dahlburg points out, "in rural India, the centuries-old practice of female infanticide can still be considered a wise course of action." (Dahlburg, "Where killing baby girls 'is no big sin'," The Los Angeles Times ) According to census statistics, "From 972 females for every 1,000 males in 1901 ... the gender imbalance has tilted to 929 females per 1,000 males. ... In the nearly 300 poor hamlets of the Usilampatti area of Tamil Nadu , as many as 196 girls died under suspicious circumstances ... Some were fed dry, unhulled rice that punctured their windpipes, or were made to swallow poisonous powdered fertilizer. Others were smothered with a wet towel, strangled or allowed to starve to death." Dahlburg profiles one disturbing case from Tamil Nadu:

Lakshmi already had one daughter, so when she gave birth to a second girl, she killed her. For the three days of her second child's short life, Lakshmi admits, she refused to nurse her. To silence the infant's famished cries, the impoverished village woman squeezed the milky sap from an oleander shrub, mixed it with castor oil, and forced the poisonous potion down the newborn's throat. The baby bled from the nose, then died soon afterward. Female neighbors buried her in a small hole near Lakshmi's square thatched hut of sunbaked mud. They sympathized with Lakshmi, and in the same circumstances, some would probably have done what she did. For despite the risk of execution by hanging and about 16 months of a much-ballyhooed government scheme to assist families with daughters, in some hamlets of ... Tamil Nadu, murdering girls is still sometimes believed to be a wiser course than raising them. "A daughter is always liabilities. How can I bring up a second?" Lakshmi, 28, answered firmly when asked by a visitor how she could have taken her own child's life eight years ago. "Instead of her suffering the way I do, I thought it was better to get rid of her." (All quotes from Dahlburg, "Where killing baby girls 'is no big sin'.")

According to Zeng et al., "The practice was largely forsaken in the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s." (Zeng et al., "Causes and Implications," p. 294.) Coale and Banister likewise acknowledge a "decline of excess female mortality after the establishment of the People's Republic ... assisted by the action of a strong government, which tried to modify this custom as well as other traditional practices that it viewed as harmful." (Coale and Banister, "Five Decades," p. 472.) But the number of "missing" women showed a sharp upward trend in the 1980s, linked by almost all scholars to the "one-child policy" introduced by the Chinese government in 1979 to control spiralling population growth. Couples are penalized by wage-cuts and reduced access to social services when children are born "outside the plan." Johansson and Nygren found that while "sex ratios generally within or fairly near the expected range of 105 to 106 boys per 100 girls for live births within the plan ... they are, in contrast, clearly far above normal for children born outside the plan, even as high as 115 to 118 for 1984-87. That the phenomenon of missing girls in China in the 1980s is related to the government's population policy is thus conclusively shown." (Sten Johansson and Ola Nygren, "The Missing Girls of China: A New Demographic Account," Population and Development Review, 17: 1 , pp. 40-41.)

Focus (2): China

The Chinese government appeared to recognize the linkage by allowing families in rural areas (where anti-female bias is stronger) a second child if the first was a girl. Nonetheless, in September 1997, the World Health Organization's Regional Committee for the Western Pacific issued a report claiming that "more than 50 million women were estimated to be 'missing' in China because of the institutionalized killing and neglect of girls due to Beijing's population control program that limits parents to one child." (See Joseph Farah, "Cover-up of China's gender-cide", Western Journalism Center/FreeRepublic, September 29, 1997.) Farah referred to the gendercide as "the biggest single holocaust in human history."

And that's just two of the offenders, folks.

See also:

http://www.rediff.com/news/2001/oct/24spec.htm

http://www.indianchild.com/abortion_infanticide_foeticide_india.htm
"According to a recent report by the United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF) up to 50 million girls and women are missing from India' s population as a result of systematic gender discrimination in India. In most countries in the world, there are approximately 105 female births for every 100 males."

http://www.cnn.com/interactive/specials/9908/china.social.overview/content/infanticide.html

http://www.webster.edu/~woolflm/femaleinfanticide.html

Kicking this back to the front page.

:kick: