"The goverment is also starting a new initiative to encourage parents to give their unwanted daughters to the state as an alternative to infanticide."....Yeah, because that worked so well in Rumania?

To be less negative, hooray for some efforts towards basic education (even billboards count). Let's hope they build more momentum in that area.

As for education in this country...Article from today's WaPo.

I have mixed feelings about this. I don't see how banning "son-centric" ads is really going to help. But I suppose it's a start. Also, the initiative to encourage parents to give up their baby girls, okay so what's going to happen to girls after they're given up?

The issue seems to me that girls still aren't as valued. Even with these initiatives.

It is the woman's right to decide if she wants to abort her female child. What is she an idiot? Are you saying? She's incapable of making her own decisions? Woman are stupid?! How dare you. It's none of your business what she does. So what if they are killing woman by the millions. They're not humans yet...right? Hmmmm where have I ehard that before?

Giving up babies for adoption is no form of solution. I cringe when I think of the insane religious zealots, prostitutions, and other demented people that are running around who'll pick these children up from the cradles before the appropriate services get to them.

While I do think that may reduce the female infanticide, they are still not going to have an appropriate quality of life...and so, why bother living? (macabre, I know, but after seeing some of the 'adopted' girls try to sell themselves on the streets of Mumbai at the age of 8...I can't bear to think of this increasing....) It's going to take so much work to change this mindset.

On the other hand, yeah, great about the commercials...maybe it'll reduce the casual misogyny upper class Indian women have to experience on a day to day basis. While this won't stop the true source of infanticide, I always applaud a positive step.

Are you sure you want to describe this as "baby girls" being "murdered" ? A lot of these missing girls were aborted in sex-selective abortions: ultrasound is cheap and widely available, despite laws against revealing the sex of the fetus. girls are also victims of neglect -- less care, less food, less medical attention. Infanticide also happens, of course, as it always has in India.Even in the 19th century there were villages that had no girls.
India has the worst sex-ratio in the world. And no one-child policy to blame, as in China.
It's hard to see the proposed orphanages making much of a difference. Among other issues, they won't be on a big enough scale to make a dent in the huge scale of the problem.

There is a difference between abortion and infanticide. Infanticide happens after the baby is born and able to live on it's own in terms of breathing, fully functioning organs, etc.

10 million babies killed for being girls is like...wasn't the Holocaust 10 million Jewish people murdered?

This is mindblowing to me... can you imagine if the response to Hitler had been, 'well, let's ban the depiction of Jewish people negatively in the media'?

Or in reverse, what if it were 10 million boys being killed for being boys?

This isn't like the Jews. the jews were murdered by the State. These girls are missing because of actions taken privately, within their families--actions which are in some cases illegal, but the laws are simply ignored. Unlike the jews, women -- pregnant women,mothers and mothers-in law -- are all in on it. Some because being an Indian woman is not a fate they'd wish on a child, some because their own status depends on producing sons, some because the costs of daughters --a huge dowry, illegal but commonplace, is required.
To turn the situation around, the govt would have to reward parents for having girls -- maybe even paying them, privileging girls in education etc., really going after dowry. Tt would have to go after the doctors who do the ultrasound. it would have to change the whole culture including in ways that might strike feministing readers as violating individual rights and privacy. Billboards showing girls in families is a tiny step, it might have a little effect along with many other things. On its own, it won't do much.

Putting myself out there but lets say that they weren't doing anything in order to counter the sex based abortion and the ratios continued to decline until the point where it was horrendously unbalanced, like China is about to face in the next 20 years. Who's fault is that?

I understand where we as feminists are coming from but this is where I take a step back and go, "Let them do what they're going to do." And what will they do with the ration of women to men is something like, 80 to 1000? or even less? Will they start ordering mail order brides? Will they marry more outside their ethnicity/nationality? Will they rent out women's wombs so males can have heirs and the numbers continue to dwindle? Or will they be forced to see the grave error they have made, possibly before it's to late.

It's good that there are people who are trying to fight this but it's so ingrained in the culture I don't see how this will help. As somecat said, the women are in on it--for whatever reasons--which makes it all the harder to stop.

As my grandmother would say, "Sometimes you gotta let people do what they're going to do,"

I guess what they mean by 10 million girls are murdered, there is a chance they're talking about dowry burnings. Or killing infant girls once they're born, such as giving her poision milk or something like that. I don't think they're talking about sex-selective abortion. However, I'm talking about those areas in India where women don't have access to ultrasounds.

I do enjoy that this issue really forces the question, is there a line and what is it, with regards to what the right to choose entails. I haven't heard anything yet that has made me think, yep, that makes sense, and I certainly havn't figured it out myself.

Oh, I think the line is crystal-clear: no infanticide. Murdering people is not OK.

Now hold on, as I recall in "Practical Ethics", philosopher Peter Singer actually brings it to the point where infanticide isn't morally clear cut. Not that the book is some kind of be all, end all of what's ethical behavior but I think it's good enough to be taken seriously. He then backpedals and basically says "but let's use birth because it's very convenient".

Yes, I've heard of that, though not in great detail. What is his argument?

Oops, sorry EG I didn't realize you were referring to my comment. As my above comment makes clear, in regards to developmental stage it's all good to me. I was referring to the scenario of sex-selective abortion, particularily in the circumstance where existing misogyny causes a frightening divergence in the population of each sex.

Though your comment specified "what the right to choose entails," and as I understand the right to choose an abortion, it's the right to not have something or somebody using your body against your will. Once a baby is born, it's no longer using your body, so the right to choose is no longer an issue.

And, you know, I'm willing to take a firm stance against infanticide. Notwithstanding my curiosity about Singer's argument.

Sorry, Jeff, we crossed posts! I was adding on to my earlier one while you were responding to it!

Sex-selective abortion--you know, I'm gonna hold a firm line on the pro-choice side, there. If a woman decides that she doesn't want to use her body to bear a female baby, I think it's immoral to force her to against her will. That said, I wonder how much coercive pressure is being brought to bear on women making that choice; not even directly coercive pressure, but lack of social and emotional support for a decision to have daughters. And I guess that's what this law is trying to address.

I can understand why you would want to hold a firm line (and of course, this could be fixed indirectly by trying to steer ourselves to a place where people want to sex-select either not at all, or the same amount of each), although at the same time, being right in principle will only get you so far. What are you willing to trade? People above have described some pretty scary scenarios. It's all about having a metric, which is the hairy part.

I think most of Singer's philosophy is born out of his interest in animal liberation, not in humans. But he inevitably stumbles across human issues in the process. I'm sure I'll do this no justice, but I'll try to outline what he's going for in a few sentences:

- He's a utilitarian, so he starts with an assumption of some measurable net "happiness" (or opposite of suffering, in the worst case) for every being as a whole.
- He assumes we don't believe in a soul or anything that makes humans inheritly different from animals - we're just a real smart ones.
- Then he asks about what rights to happiness we have. How do we balance the needs of a human and a chicken? Or a mosquito?
- After a long while, he comes to something regarding weighing everyone's interests the same. So, for example, a cow might have interest in not feeling pain, but at the same time it's not looking eagerly forward to a great day of eating grass tomorrow. Humans over some age (a point which he avoids debating, partly why he goes back to birth) can make plans, are self-concious.
- People go through a development process where they're born with the interests of many animals - eg, not feeling pain, being touched - but not planning ahead. In other words, if we can kill an intelligent monkey for research, we can kill a baby (neglecting the interests of people that know it, of course).

This is an outline that would surely insult him, but it's a really basic intro, I think. There's all sorts of off-shoots into things like, when is research on animals ok, when is eating cruelty-free meat ok, what about babies with severe mental handicaps, etc. It's all very interesting.

If you're interested, my suggestion is to read Practical Ethics and not Animal Liberation. P.E. contains all of the interesting stuff from the latter anyways, minus 200 pages of "can you believe they do this?" that I'm sure you know about anyways.

The word murder was used in the article. It wasn't Samhita's word choice.

Murder is killing a baby after it's born and it's never right. Pete Singer argues it's ethical to kill seriously deformed babies to minimize suffering but it's strange to compare a baby girl in India to a seriously deformed baby.

I listened to Peter Singer talk once on NPR and he was describing another situation in which infanticide he thought was not unethical: During WWII It had happened that some German Jews in hiding had to smother a newborn as soon as it was born, while Nazi soldiers where searching for them, because if it cried it would give them away. It sounds really horrible, but it does make sense to me.

Regarding a woman's wish to abort her female baby? Does no one realize the extent of cultural influence on these infanticides? Quite commonly, in the lower class, back country Indian culture, the women are ashamed to give birth to female babies because of all the stigma associated with it. Girls are "burdens", they need dowries, they cannot provide a useful income without becoming prostitutes, and they are ill omens in the parts of the country that perform the infanticides (yes, AFTER the baby is born).

Abortions happen very frequently in India, even among upper class women, because they are not as inaccessible there as they are here. What needs to be questioned is a woman's fear of birthing another woman. Frequently, the mother goes ahead and kills the baby to avoid mistreatment and abuse from her in-laws and community. That's not because she wanted to, it was so she could survive...and that, in a roundabout and cryptic way, is her right.

The only answer is feminism. Changing attitudes.

This is definitely a serious problem in India, with no clear solutions at all.

This bias against girls stems from several related factors in traditional Indian society:

1) Children are expected to care for their parents in their old age. And this does not mean the Western sense of 'care for'. Parents live with the children and are mostly dependent on them.

2) Since the man is traditionally the breadwinner, and the girl leaves for her in-laws after her marriage, the parents usually depend on the son in every way.

3) Dowry, of course. Huge problem. Even among educated middle-class people. Greed knows no education.

4) So in general, the 'value' of a son is much much more than a daughter.

In modern urban India, things are changing as more and more women are working in the tech industries. The private sector, esp the service industries tend to be less discriminating coz they need every ounce of talent they can get in order to survive the competition.

I think that's the only major way change will happen. Parents will begin to see that women can be a financial source of support as much as men.

Clearly, the culture in India is very different than in the U.S. Can you imagine being a woman in India having to make that choice?

In the U.S., a lot of people prefer boys. Everyone says 'boys are easier to raise' etc. and there is a certain amount of social pressure- I have heard of a lot of families that have several daughters, trying for a boy. I wonder if women do have abortions here, because they want a boy, and only want one or few children?

It sounds like the Health Minister is kind of a radical, hey?

"What needs to be questioned is a woman's fear of birthing another woman."

What really needs to be questioned is how these women and adolescent girls were treated as small girls. Waiting until they're fertile to try influencing their feelings about pregnancy may be waiting far too late.

1) At what point does a fetus have a sex? Are we talking abortions after the three-month mark?

2) I'm sure someone has better information on this than me, but I have a feeling dowries are illegal in India now. Or at least, in some states. It's just clearly still going on in private, with nasty consequences.

I agree that feminism is necessary to change these attitudes and it's even more necessary to alter the treatment of women so they aren't ashamed of birthing more women...but centuries of conditioning went into this culture. Pointing stuff out to these individuals does nothing. This is a very personal subject for me...I've worked with these women trying to open a domestic violence shelter in Mumbai and it is amazing how many of them will run away to return to their abusive husbands out of shame. It is imperative we target the daughters with this new thought, yet it is so difficult getting past their mothers (who these girls look up to more than some strange, single feminist Indian American with an accent and some medical training). No one of any culture likes to hear how they're backward. Dowries, bride burning, and infanticide are all illegal...yet very much in practice. The only parallel I can think of at this minute is how America had even more alcoholics during the prohibition. Questioning is something we can do forever...what I would like to gain out of this thread is what I can physically, with CULTURAL SENSITIVITY (not a barrage of explanation that they will ultimately ignore), do for the betterment, education, and enlightenment of these women so I can improve their quality of life.

This paper http://ucatlas.ucsc.edu/gender/gender_india.html notes one researcher "found that increased female literary, education and labor force participation increased women’s empowerment and reduced gender mortality bias. He found that increased literacy can have the most powerful influence and can affect change more quickly than other social factors."

But then readers of this blog already knew that.

That's a very good read. The shelter encourages reading and it has made a very noticeable impact. Labor force participation is kind of tricky given certain laws, standards, and demands in Mumbai, specifically...but as predictable as this sounds, arts and crafts have actually stood as a dynamic substitute for streetwalking. My primary concern is watching them act as if this is transient, meaningless, and their time at a domestic violence center is part of some experiment or amusement for "upper class city people". But right, no complaints, every step of progress counts.

That's a very good read. The shelter encourages reading and it has made a very noticeable impact. Labor force participation is kind of tricky given certain laws, standards, and demands in Mumbai, specifically...but as predictable as this sounds, arts and crafts have actually stood as a dynamic substitute for streetwalking. My primary concern is watching them act as if this is transient, meaningless, and their time at a domestic violence center is part of some experiment or amusement for "upper class city people". But right, no complaints, every step of progress counts.

yes, antahkarana, on that link is amartya sen's famous paper which says 100 million girls are missing from asia, south asia and africa because of sexism and poverty.