Eliminating Female Humans to Cater for Males
- Category: Gender
- Date 15-02-2006
- 246 views
Is it curse or witchcraft that bedevils women? They are forever beleaguered with misfortune, much of it occasioned on them by themselves, or by collaborating with men to do away with their own breed. To the extent that today, the birth of female children is being slowly throttled; seriously minimised as though women are unnecessary human species.
To all intents and purposes, women are perfect partners with men in all human dealings as equal beings, but whenever there is need to reduce human clogging, the hammer falls on the common loser – the female person. In communities where abortion is tolerated (and even where it is illegal), it is much easier to get rid of a female foetus.
A revelation from an authentic research has alleged that around ten million female foetuses may have been aborted in India alone over the past twenty years. This is an entire generation in the united republic of Tanzania, about ten times the population of Zanzibar to be annihilated in a couple of decades.
The research has revealed that, based on the natural sex ratio in other countries, between 13.6 and 13.8 million girls should have been born in India in 1997. Instead, the actual number of girls born during that year was 13.1 million, giving a deficit of more than half a million female births in one year. This is about a third of the population of Zanzibar being wiped out every year.
This has been blamed on parental sex determination and selective abortion, purposely to reduce or altogether avert the delivery of the female progeny. The reasons for this are clear and hardly surprising. The traditional preference for boys is the overriding dynamic in this scenario. Social-cultural beliefs too have been cited as being responsible for the alarming levels of infanticide or abortion of female foetuses.
In our own community, as elsewhere in the world, this state of affairs needs no explaining, as there is greater worth attached to a boy child than to a girl child. Thus a pregnancy that is known or suspected to be full of a female baby stands a greater risk of termination, if choices have to be made. On the contrary, a pregnancy stands a high chance of protection, on the dyed-in-the-wool supposition that a baby-boy is forthcoming.
In the case of India, this scenario has been intensified by the emergency of the ultrasound sex-screening scheme. The author of this unflattering report has noted that if this practice (of getting rid of female foetuses) has been common for most of the past two decades since the access to ultrasound became widespread, then a figure of ten (10) million missing female births would not be unreasonable.
Poverty too has taken its share of blame for the death of many female children as parents try to relieve themselves of the responsibilities that go with fathering and/or mothering a girl child. Paying dowry is an ordinary tradition in India.
Yet, it is the bride to pay for a groom’s hand before marriage. Due to poverty, very few families especially from the lower castes can afford dowry. Hence, once the poor parents understand that they are due to deliver a girl, they resort to abortion as an escape route from future dowry payments.
In this entire hullabaloo, the astonishing discovery is that “the girl deficit is far more prominent in educated women”. Uneducated women could easily nurse their pregnancies without prejudice, deliver and bringing up their girls without clamour. Elite women who would surely protect the underprivileged womenfolk have been cited as worse abusers of the girl children’s right to life.
They have the means to apply the technological (ultrasound) devices and know the sex of the child to be born, and often choose to abort if it is a girl! Certainly, if the women who carry the pregnancies had the resolve to protect the vulnerable victims, most lives would be saved. Even in Tanzania!
By Venansio Ahabwe
Source: Peering Eye, Sunday Citizen