Many people think how difficult it to give birth girl child in a society where sons are considered everything. In the early 1990s, an affordable ultrasound technology spread across India and people start using it for sex determination
Female foeticide is one of the most sensitive issues today. Different people have their different view on that. Female feticide is a process of aborting female fetuses after about 18 weeks of gestation.
Ultrasound & its importance
It is also known as sonogram and it uses sound wave at higher frequencies which stimulate the human tissue. This stimulation allows professionals to monitor images such as the flow of blood and the movement of internal organs. Unlike other imaging technologies, it doesn’t use radiation. Hence this technology is one of the preferred methods to see the developing fetus and plus it’s lower in cost.
People mostly perform this method if they are having pain, swelling or other symptoms that require an internal view of your organs. The importance of this technology can be seen during the pregnancy where it can be used to find many conditions that can harm both the mother and the baby. Ultrasound can also keep track of the growth and the development of a baby in the way it should be. The most important there is no evidence of negative effect to the mother and the baby.
The spread of ultrasound and rise of female foeticide
The whole process of checking of sex begins with the initiation of government itself. Due to the problem of increasing in population because people give birth to so many to get the one boy child. Hence the government introduced those new technologies like ultrasound in public hospital in the 1970s to check the sex of the child. Since then the technology spread across the country and the major population and the doctors got aware of this, hence the female foeticide starts growing exponentially.
According to The Time of India, the BMC data shows that there is a rise in abortion in India, i.e., 13% jump from 2015 to 2016.
Causes of Female Foeticide
Today in the 21st century where the world coming with new ideas and thoughts and everyone is given equal freedom and mentality of the people changed but the life of a girl or a woman is marked with big disrespect.
The reasons why female foeticide happing in India or the rest of the world varies for the different background of people. If we concentrate in India, the biggest issue or the reason is the dowry system. According to Wikipedia, “Dowry” refers to the durable goods, cash, and real or movable property that the bride’s family gives to the bridegroom, his parents, or his relatives as a condition of the marriage.
Nowadays it became when worse that people started asking so much money and bride’s family not able to fulfill it. That is the issue where people with low financial are not willing to have a girl child. Hence female foeticide is the only solution to those families.
Next, we have is the education of girl child. People strongly believe that educating a girl or spending some money for schools or colleges is not worth because at last they belong to some other family and the girl family will not get benefit from her knowledge.
The government has taken different steps like women empowerment, the Dowry Prohibition Act, 1961, education of girl child and the most important Pre-Conception and Pre-Natal Diagnostic Techniques (PCPNDT) Act, 1994 to stop female foeticides in India.
Pre-Conception and Pre-Natal Diagnostic Techniques (PCPNDT) Act
This act was passed by the Parliament of India in 1994 to stop female foeticides and hold the declining sex ratio in India due to the female foeticides. Basically Pre-Natal Diagnostic technique are helpful for planning for possible complication with the birth process, deciding whether to continue the pregnancy, finding a condition that may affect future pregnancy or managing the remaining week of the pregnancy but some narrow-minded people use such medical technique like ultrasonography and Amniocentesis to determine sex which leads to the sex-selective abortion.
All the diagnostic centers, genetic laboratories, genetic clinics, and ultrasound clinic needs to register compulsorily to avoid above cases.
Hence government came up with such act that not only prohibits determination and disclosure of the sex but also bans the content or ads indicating of techniques related to prenatal sex determination.
Situation in other countries
Mora told the 2nd MenEngage Global Symposium, a four-day conference here on involving men and boys in gender equality. “We have learned in the last years that India and China are no longer the exceptions as such. We have seen how discrimination, son preference, and all the related issues have progressively expanded to countries we never before thought could practice sex selection, such as the European countries.”
In United State, lawmakers have introduced a new legislation in the House of Representatives to ban sex-selective abortion as they found the rise in female foeticide in the country.
Under the Prenatal Nondiscrimination Act (PRENDA), introduced in House of Representative, a doctor who performed an abortion could face up to five years in prison if race or sex was a factor in the woman’s decision to end her pregnancy and any medical professionals who failed to report a suspected sex abortion to law enforcement would face up to a one-year prison sentence as well.
In 2015, an Indian-American woman has been sentenced to 20 years in prison for performing female foeticide in South Bend, Indiana.
Sex-based abortion is not only the problem of India or China, it also starting growing in western countries.
Sex determination was a sensitive topic in India and it will remain sensitive unless we don’t change our thinking. It’s just our believe and believe is something that happens due to cascading. So let’s stop cascading this and save children from getting killed. More than law, it’s about humanity. So it’s up to you whether you want to change your mentality or kill someone.