- 02 Mar 2007 01:23
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Hindu India Aborts Females Illegally
J. Grant Swank, Jr., www.MichNews.com, Mar. 1, 2007
“There are traditions in India’s Rajasthan of women committing johar which is mass suicide or sati where a widow throws herself onto her husband’s funeral pyre. A woman’s entire identity was subsumed by her husband. If he died, so must she.
“Women who committed sati would have temples built in their honor and palaces in Rajasthan commonly have a wall displaying the last hand prints women left before they died.
“‘In a woman’s death there was value,’ the (human rights) activist said. ‘In her survival, there never was value.’
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Some in today’s India decided to expose the abortion atrocity. They masterminded an ingenious plan to film those in the medical “profession†breaking the law by killing female unborns.
“The video shows the doctor laughing as she levels a fee of 2,000 rupees (about $44) to abort a child in the seventh month of pregnancy,†per The Washington Times’ Julia Duin.
It’s illegal but done daily in India. After all, females are not considered important, as in Islam and throughout China.
“In childhood a female must be subject to her father, in youth to her husband, when her lord is dead to her sons; a woman must never be independent.â€â€”Verse 5:148 in the Hindu laws of Manu
“Meena Sharma, a 26-year-old freelance reporter, knew there were massive violations of government law forbidding doctors from telling pregnant women the sex of their unborn children and using abortion to eliminate unwanted girls.
“She approached Shripal Shaktawat, Jaipur bureau chief of the Sahara Samay TV network, with an idea he could not refuse. What if she lined up several pregnant women with TV cameras hidden in their purses who would say their fetus was a girl and they wanted an abortion? Miss Sharma would go along, playing the part of the woman’s aunt or mother-in-law.
“‘It was an emotional issue for me,’ said the reporter, who remembers as a 14-year-old seeing one of her pregnant aunts being instructed by a physician to abort the female fetus.
“In nine episodes from April 4 to June 13, the TV network aired a 12-hour series, ‘Murder in the Womb.’ It was based on undercover visits to 140 health clinics in 36 cities in four Indian states. Doctors in 100 clinics either agreed to do a sex-determination test and abortion or gave referrals to other doctors who would. Both actions are illegal.
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“It had taken Miss Sharma a year to compile the devastating report, which showed doctor after doctor on camera illegally urging the women—all of whom were at least in their fifth month or more—to abort their female offspring. Abortion is illegal in India after the 20th week unless there are threats to the mother’s health.
“The documentaries shamed the region’s most prominent doctors. A group of physicians offered the station $34 million to cancel the series.
“On April 14, the government filed charges against 21 Rajasthan doctors in the series—but did not prosecute them.
“The Rajasthan Medical Council suspended the licenses of seven—but allowed them to continue practicing.
“Then in the early morning hours of April 18, a group of six men threw stones and broke windows at Mr. Shaktawat’s home. He was away in New Delhi, but his family was told worse would happen to them if the series was not stopped.â€
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In most places in the world, a mother can find out the sex of her unborn child; in India, it’s illegal to do so. If the child is female, there is a good chance she will never be born.
“Roughly 6.7 million abortions occur yearly in India, but aborted girls outnumber boys by 500,000—or 10 million over the past two decades—creating a huge imbalance between males and females in the world’s largest democracy. Ratios of men to women are being altered at an unprecedented rate in India and neighboring China, two countries which account for 40 percent of the world’s population.
“According to UNICEF, India produces 25 million babies a year. China produces 17 million. Together, these are one-third of the world’s babies, so how their women choose to regulate births affects the globe.
“Female infanticide—whereby tiny girls were either poisoned, buried alive or strangled—has existed for thousands of years in India. But its boy-to-girl ratio didn’t begin to widen precipitously until the advent of the ultrasound, or sonogram, machine in the 1970s, enabling a woman to tell the sex of her child by the fourth month of her pregnancy.
“That coupled with the legalization of abortion in 1971 made it possible to dispose of an unwanted girl without the neighbors even knowing the mother was pregnant. In 2001, 927 girls were born for every 1,000 boys, significantly below the natural birth rate of about 952 girls for every 1,000 boys.
“In many regions, however, this imbalance has reached alarming levels and it continues to grow.â€
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“‘It is a matter of international and national shame for us that India, with [economic] growth of 9 percent still kills its daughters,’ Renuka Chowdhury, the Cabinet-level minister of state for women and child development told the Press Trust of India news agency in an interview that was widely published in the national press.
“Mrs. Chowdhury announced plans to set up a nationwide network of orphanages where women can drop off unwanted daughters with no questions asked.
“‘We will bring up the children. But don’t kill them because there really is a crisis situation,’ she says.
“Yet the practice of “female feticide†is so widespread and deeply ingrained in the nation’s psyche, scholars and activists fear that even the most vigorous attempts to combat it would require a lifetime or longer to restore nature’s balance.â€
What is especially abhorrent are the numbers of females who support killing womb babies. The National Organization for Women is one prime example. Planned Parenthood is another. It has to be one of the most demonic decisions a human can make to slay the defenseless unborn. Yet more so when the killers are women killing woman.
Many times females born are traded off as slaves in order to get rid of them.
“Currently, women-starved parts of western India are importing women. The best trafficking season, reports Supriya Awasthi, South Asia director for Free the Slaves, a New Delhi-based advocacy group, is in the summer during the monsoons, when people are most hungry and desperate.
“Girls from Nepal and Bangladesh constitute 70 percent of all trafficked girls. Top Nepalese hubs are the capital Katmandu; Sindhupalchowk, a district north of Katmandu; and Makwanpur, which is east of the capital.
“They end up at a slave market known as Phoolbagh in the Purnia district of Bihar, India’s poorest state. Girls are then traded to circuses or loaded on trucks or trains bound for states like Punjab and Haryana, which have the country’s worst male-female sex ratios.
“Miss Awasthi particularly remembers one 12-year-old she ran into in Allahabad in Uttar Pradesh. She had been raped by five men and was three months pregnant. She had a baby boy, who died.
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As with so many laws in these countries, they are not enforced. Long-held customs of torture and murder override the laws. In Muslim countries, the Islamic customs of “honor killing,†hanging females from roadside poles and torturing “disobedient†women take place daily.
These countries want to show to the Western world that they are civilized by pointing to their laws; however, the laws are frequently negated at the grassroots level. Police, media and judges often turn their heads in favor of males who discard females.
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