Let her live… not leave

Had not she aborted, she would have become a doctor, a lawyer, a teacher, a social worker, a mother, a daughter, a sister, a wife and a woman. But she was killed before she could experience the womanhood. In India today also a girl child is looked upon as an unwanted offspring. She shut her eyes before she could open them to look outside of the mother’s womb, to look the world full of life.

A surprising study carried out by the United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF) says about 50 million girls and women are missing from Indian crowd due to systematic gender discrimination in India. In all most all countries in the world, 105 females take birth for every 100 males. In India this ratio has been highly affected. There are less than 93 women for every 100 men in India’s population. And the one and the major reason for this is the practice of female infanticide in India.

This practice is mostly provoked by other bizarre social practices such as dowry system. Dowry system demands a sum of money from bride’s family at the time of marriage. A birth of a girl child is believed to be great concern for the poor family due to this malpractice. The family would always prefer boy child over girl child so they can demand money at the time of marriage instead of giving.

It would be wrong to think that gender discrimination is only limited to poor families. Cultural beliefs and social norms play huge role in deciding the gender play. The threat to womanhood would not stop, unless these norms are challenged.

It is the worst picture and hard to believe that advertisements of ultrasound scanners which detect the sex of a child highlights the taglines such as ‘Spend 600 rupees now and save 50,000 rupees later’. Here surely the later sum of money indicates the amount of dowry and advertisement claims that you would save this money in future by spending 600 bucks to abort the girl child.

The scientific methods to detect the sex of the child are improving day by day thus threatening the existence of a woman. We need major awareness programs to control this drastic situation. India needs thorough revision of its laws regarding to malpractices against women. We need to do something to prevent the abortions of female foetuses.