A recent research in Canada and the US, exposing the shocking fact that immigrant Indian women living in those countries have no qualms about aborting their foetus to avoid giving birth to a girl child, has busted the myth that socio-economic pressures alone of the kind that prevail in communities in India compel expecting mothers to abort the female foetus.
An editorial in the Canadian Medical Association Journal details how immigrant women from India — as well as other Asian countries such as China, the Philippines and Vietnam — routinely abort a female foetus, leading to serious distortions in the male-female ratio in their respective communities. The CMAJ’s editorial also finds resonance in a working paper prepared by the US National Bureau of Economic Research in 2009 that shows how the sex ratio for second and third births is increasingly skewed in the Indian immigrant community.
While the male-female ratio for the first birth among Indians in the US was close to the standard of 105 boys for every 100 girls, it worsened significantly for the second birth if the first child was a girl. The ratio dipped even further to nearly 190 boys for every 100 girls, in the case of a third birth following two daughters. Clearly, most parents don’t mind having one or even two girls but a son is necessary to ‘complete’ the family.
The active role of expecting mothers in the decision to abort a female foetus cannot be ignored. Last year, a physician at the University of California at San Francisco carried out a sample qualitative survey of 65 pregnant Indian women in the US who had opted for foetal sex selection between 2004 and 2009, and found that 89 per cent of them had aborted the female foetus, while 40 per cent had terminated one pregnancy earlier.
That the subjects of this study come from different income and education levels underlines the gravity of the problem, since the popular perception has been that the practice is more common among the ‘uneducated’ women living in the shadow of their immediate family members.
When immigrant women who are not burdened either by financial constraints or faced with pressure from members of an extended family choose to abort female foetuses, their actions become even more impossible to justify than the incidents of female foeticide in the lesser privileged families across India.
The educated, expecting mothers belonging to the Indian immigrant community exploit the legally available sex-determination tests in the countries they live in to get rid of the girl child. Such tests are illegal in India because it was being misused for the very purpose that immigrant Indian women are employing it for abroad. Of course, the fact that such tests are banned in India has not prevented its discreet practice.
