Abortion:Killing off India's Girls

[Guest guest]

Abortion in India Is Tipping Scales Sharply

Against Girls

By Celia W. Dugger (New York Times)

 

April 22, 2001

 

Daffarpur, India - Here in the northern state of Punjab, couples who

abort their

female fetuses are known as "kudi-maar" - or "daughter-killers." The

local health

worker who lives in this village, a kindly woman named Jaswinder

Kaur, recently

led the way through a maze of narrow lanes to the home of one such

family.

 

Gurjit Kaur, 22, said she paid 500 rupees - about $11 - for an

ultrasound test a

year ago, then aborted her pregnancy after a doctor told her she was

carrying a

girl. Now her belly has swelled again, this time with the longed-for

male child.

Her plump face seemed radiant with well-being.

 

"Our elders wanted a boy," she explained. "Boys are important because

they

have to look after all the property."

 

Though India outlawed sex-determination tests in 1994, their use has

become

commonplace as ultrasound technology - which became available in

cities during

the 1980's - has spread to small towns served by itinerant doctors

who carry the

compact machines from clinic to clinic.

 

Early figures from the 2001 census, conducted in February and March,

have

made it clear that female fetuses are being regularly aborted,

continuing a trend

that first became marked in the 1980's. The number of girls per 1,000

boys

dropped to 927 this year from 945 in 1991 and 962 in 1981.

 

The fall in the ratio of girls to boys over the past decade, when

India's population

grew by a staggering 181 million, has been most extreme in the

richest states of

the north and west, where more people can afford tests and abortions,

demographers and economists say.

 

For example, here in Punjab, India's most prosperous farming state,

the ratio of

girls to boys has plummeted to 793 girls per 1,000 boys from 875,

while in

Gujarat, a leading industrial state, the figure for girls has fallen

to 878 from 928.

 

A pronounced gender imbalance has long been a feature of life in

India,

especially in the north. India has the lowest ratio of females to

males among the

10 most populous countries in the world. Neglect of the health and

nutrition of

girls and women and high rates of maternal death in childbirth helped

give males

a survival edge. Now ultrasound technology is giving the bias against

girls added

intensity.

 

The results - found not just in India, home to about one-sixth of

humanity, but

elsewhere in Asia, too, - are disturbing to many Indians, who fear

the long-term

social consequences and regret the injustice.

 

"India is catching up with other sexist, modern societies like South

Korea and

China in sex-selective abortions," said the Nobel Prize-winning

economist

Amartya Sen of Trinity College at Cambridge and a native of India.

"It's a

technological revolution of a reactionary kind."

 

Professor Sen, who has been writing about the tens of millions of

"missing"

women in Asia for a decade, noted that the startling deterioration of

the sex

ratios for children in China, India and South Korea has occurred even

as overall

sex ratios for females in those countries have modestly increased.

 

But longer life spans for women and rising literacy rates have not

yet changed the

strong cultural preference for sons, who will carry the family name,

inherit

ancestral property, care for parents in old age and light their

fathers' funeral

pyres.

 

A range of groups in India, including the Indian Medical Association,

the high

priests of the Sikh religion and nonprofit groups like the Voluntary

Health

Association, are campaigning against sex-selective abortions.

 

But enforcement of the 1994 law against sex-determination tests is

weak. A. R.

Nanda, a high-ranking civil servant in the central government's

health ministry,

said that as far as he knew no one in this nation of more than one

billion people

had ever been convicted of violating it. Nor is there any system for

monitoring

the sex of aborted fetuses.

 

In Punjab, Joginder Singh, the state's director of health services

for family

welfare, said the state prosecutes a case only if a woman complains

that she was

forced to have a test and abort a female fetus - and as far as he

knows, no

woman has ever made such a complaint.

 

"It's the ladies who have to come forward," Dr. Singh insisted.

 

But experts say women are unlikely to complain since they often want

a boy as

intensely as their husbands and fathers-in-law, or cannot resist the

relentless

pressure to have one from families they depend on for economic

survival.

 

Here in a cluster of villages and towns in the Patiala district, the

outlawed use of

ultrasound tests to identify female fetuses and the illegal abortions

that follow

happen underground, but barely. In just 10 years, the number of girls

per 1,000

boys has dropped by 101, to 770 - and none of the doctors, health

workers or

residents interviewed here had any doubt about why.

 

"It's because of the testing," said Amarjeet Chander, a veteran

gynecologist who

headed the government hospital in Dera Bassi, population 15,690,

before

starting her own 18-bed hospital there in 1990. "The machines are

everywhere

now."

 

Indeed, large signs advertising ultrasound tests are quite visible.

In one small,

jumbled shopping center in Dera Bassi, there were two such medical

clinics.

Radiologists from the city of Panchkula, 15 miles away, visit these

clinics once a

week, carrying their ultrasound machines.

 

Drs. Dinesh and Savita Mittal, a husband and wife team, run the City

Hospital

there and advertised on their sign board that Dr. Dev Batra provided

ultrasound

tests. But the Mittals became upset when asked about the use of

ultrasound for

sex determination. They said that the ultrasound machine was Dr.

Batra's alone

and that they had nothing to do with the testing.

 

Oddly, the morning after they were interviewed, the Mittals had

painted over the

sign advertising the tests, and Dr. Dinesh Mittal said the couple had

called Dr.

Batra to cancel his services.

 

Later the same day, Gurjit Kaur, who lives in the village of

Daffarpur, about six

miles from Dera Bassi, volunteered that it was Dr. Batra who did the

ultrasound

test on her at City Hospital, while Dr. Savita Mittal told her that

she was carrying

a girl and performed the abortion for 2,000 rupees, about $44.

 

When Mrs. Kaur became pregnant again this year, she went back to Dr.

Batra,

she said. "Dr. Batra's wife told me I was having a boy," she said,

laughing

infectiously. "I was so happy!"

 

Back at the clinic, Dr. Savita Mittal denied that she performed

abortions or

knew Mrs. Kaur. "She's talking about me?" said Dr. Mittal, shrugging

and

shaking her head. "I don't think so. I don't know this Gurjit Kaur."

 

Dr. Batra, the radiologist, made a similar denial after his wife

awakened him

from a midday nap in Panchkula at their imposing new home, decorated

with

white marble floors, elaborate light fixtures and pillars. "Sex

determination is

banned by the government," he said. "How can we do it?"

 

Sanjeev Gupta, a general practitioner in nearby Mubarakpur,

population 4,116,

explained just how and why doctors do the tests. The huge lettering

for

ultrasound tests on the sign of his own clinic dwarfed the name of

the clinic itself.

 

As he treated walk-in patients for everything from earaches to broken

fingers,

Dr. Gupta explained some of the cultural reasons that families crave

at least one

or two sons in an era when young people are also more likely to be

educated

and to want smaller families.

 

A girl requires the onerous payment of a dowry at the time of

marriage, then

moves to another village to join her husband's family. When parents

grow old in

India, a country where there is no Social Security, it is not

daughters, but sons,

who care for them, he said.

 

While people are satisfied with one daughter, they are determined to

have sons.

So the demand for sex determination tests is great. The going rate is

500 rupees,

Dr. Gupta said, while a legal ultrasound test for, say, an abdominal

cyst, costs

just 350 rupees, or close to $8.

 

"Frankly, everybody knows it is illegal, even the doctors and

radiologists

performing these types of scans," he said. "But under the cover of

diagnostic

processes, they perform it. They tell the patient verbally about the

sex. They

don't give it in writing. They do it for monetary purposes, to

sustain their

practice."

 

Dr. Gupta said a radiologist goes to his clinic twice a week, carting

her own

ultrasound machine, but he usually does not permit her to perform sex

determination tests, unless, for example, the couple already have

four girls and

will keep having babies until they finally get a boy.

 

"In that way, if you perform the sex determination, you keep the

population

down," he said.

 

Villagers in this heavily Sikh area are equally plain-spoken about

the use of

ultrasound - and like the doctors, they say it has become available

in nearby

towns only in the last five years or so.

 

"All couples go for this ultrasound," said Surjit Kaur, the village

chief in Kakrali,

as local women sat with her on a string cot, tittering. Like many

Sikh women,

she takes Kaur as a second name; Sikh men typically use Singh as a

surname.

 

Mrs. Kaur, one of more than a million women who have been elected to

village

councils since India set aside a third of all the seats for women in

1993, was

unsentimental about the reasons young couples get the tests, though

she

nervously twisted the diamond stud in her nose as she spoke. "It's

because they

don't want a girl child," she said.

 

And Mrs. Kaur, who has personally benefited from the country's

efforts to lift

the status of women, said that if the tests had been available when

she was

pregnant, first with two daughters, then with two sons, she might

have gotten

them. "If my in-laws had pressured me, I would have had to use

ultrasound," she

said.

 

In Daffarpur, Gurjit Kaur, the 22- year-old, and her sister-in-law,

Surinder

Kaur, 26, whose families live together, each chose to seek an

ultrasound test

and to abort a female fetus.

 

After Surinder Kaur gave birth to a second daughter, she said she

became

pregnant again too soon. She and her husband went to Dr. Batra's

clinic in

Panchkula for an ultrasound test to find out the sex. Her husband,

Gurpal Singh,

a machine operator, said Dr. Batra summoned him into the clinic room.

"He told

me, `Your wife is carrying a female child.' I said, `I have a girl?'

He said, `Yes.' "

 

Surinder Kaur said if it had been a boy, they would have kept the

baby, but

since it was a girl and she was so depleted physically, she aborted.

One recent

day, she lay exhausted on a cot, while her children napped and played

around

her. Just the day before, she had aborted her sixth pregnancy - with

no

ultrasound beforehand - and became sterilized, too weak to face

another birth.

 

"Now I don't want any more children, girl or boy," she said, lifting

herself up

feebly on an elbow.

 

In a room across the courtyard, Gurjit and her husband, Jagtar Singh,

a machine

operator like his older brother, talked about her decision to abort

the fetus that

would have been their second daughter.

 

Her husband had wanted only two children. He said they felt he could

afford to

educate only two children well. But while he did not care if both

were girls, his

wife was set on a boy.

 

"It was my decision," she said firmly. "I didn't want another girl."

 

Her husband said he still felt guilty that he let her do it. He has

read about the

declining child sex ratio in the newspaper. And he is convinced

society will pay

the price when the current generation of boys grow up to find there

are not

enough women for them to marry. Only then - too late, he said - will

society

appreciate the value of women.

 

"Now it's the girl's family who pay the dowry to the boy's family,"

he said. "But

in 10 or 15 years, you'll see, it will be the boy's family paying the

girl's family."