FRONTLINE/World | India: The Missing Girls | PBS

A Society Out of Balance
http://www.pbs.org/frontlineworld/rough/2007/04/the_missing_gir.html
In 2006, when Neil Katz and his wife and traveled to India to live and work, the one issue that kept grabbing their attention was northern India's deep cultural preference for sons over daughters.

The desire for sons can be so great, that some families, after having a girl or two, will abort female fetuses until they bear a son. The practice is called female feticide or sex selection.

In some ways this is a very old tale. Long before medical abortion became available, unwanted girls were killed after birth or not given enough food and medicine to survive. But modern technology has changed that. Ultrasound machines, which make it possible to determine the gender of a fetus, have spread from big city hospitals to small country clinics. Portable machines are taken to remote villages by motorcycle. As a consequence, infanticide has given way to feticide.

Category:

News & Politics

Tags:

• India
• Abortion
• Girls
• Female
• Feticide
• Gender
• Ratio
• Dowry
• Ultrasound
• control
• Reproductive
• Healthcare
• Punjab
• Neil

[sonureddyin]

I am ashamed of this. It's really a shame I guess we all understand why this is happening "dowry". I have seen educated families and men taking/demanding and being passive about dowry. Please stop this evil practice which will ultimately put an end to this cruelty.

[Vydio]

These dead children are not "missing". Their scumbag parents know exactly where they are and what happened to them.

[Truth128]

This is barbaric, May God punish those that practice this evil crime. 

[siant666]

Ohh well.....I'm not one to judge India's backward and archaic culture and its faults but I am going to say that if this "sex selection" keeps up then the entire country's population would implode in a couple generations....

[broyomama]

A searching question to ask someone who is (so-called) pro-choice: Should it be legal for a woman to abort a fetus only because it is female? Many will say "no" - thus opposing their view that an abortion should always be the woman's choice.

[Nemomeansnoname]

@littlepakistan abortion in India is not illegal. Having an abortion based on gender is. That's the same in the U.S. and in China and basically all of the Western world. So that's not really being hypocritical.

[SinnFein4ever]

You TELL them, were455!

Parents who kill their own daughters should be drug out into the street and lynched!

And THEN their bodies should be tossed into a garbage dump!

Let them be treated the same way that they treat their daughters...

Dispose of them without mercy, and then throw them away like trash!

[SinnFein4ever]

I actually first heard about the problem of gendercide in a documentary on China.

Apparently in China, the problem is that their government only allows couples to have one child.

So a lot of them have ultrasounds to see what it is (even though having an ultrasound for gender is illegal in China), and if it's a girl, they abort it.

In more rural areas of China, often what happens is that the fathers take their newborn baby girls out to the rice paddies and drown them.

[yodelifyoucan]

i know it's a month old but i'll tell you that at 19 i was very stuck in an abusive relationship, ( stupid) did'nt manage my personal health well, didn't keep jobs and didn't wash my clothes or eat healthy food or some days eat at all (stupid). I abused prescription medication and then i found out i was pregnant (stupid).

[mtrios08]

How would you feel if you're the one that was aborted? did you had an abortion too? ur just lucky that ur parents give you life.

[littlepakistan]

Abortion is autorzed in the western world why not then in India.

Stop to be hypocrite!

[sagar400]

What does that mean? Turning a blind eye to the problem will only exacerbate it. England and America has murderous history and its ongoing but so what?