Girls Being Targeted

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While the caste system in India has been officially banned, the reality of life in the nation of more than 1.12 billion people is a very different story. Both the caste system and the prejudicial attitude against women still survives.
The prejudice against female children exists throughout the culture, spanning all walks of life in India. The reason? Women are considered to be of less value to parents who want male babies to raise and to have available in the parents old age as a form of retirement benefit. Male children have the perceived ability to take care of the parents better than a female might when the parents are older and need care.

Prime Minister Manmohan Singh though has called for an end to the practise of aborting female fetuses, calling the discriminatory practise a “national shame.” The male children also have an ability to attract wives of substance who also can bring with them large dowries, adding to the familial finances.

The most recent estimates are of 500,000 female fetuses being aborted every year as reported by the British medical journal The Lancet as far back as 2006.

From an article in 2006 by Margaret Somerville:

Shirish Sheth (Jan 21, p 185)1 rightly decries the appalling fact that, as a result of abortion, “about 100 million girls are missing from the world—they are dead”, and properly emphasises that, since 1986, all members of the Federation of Obstetric and Gynaecological Societies of India have been “asked to desist, dissociate, and discourage female feticide as it is a ‘crime against humanity’”. My questions are these: are all abortions—or even just abortions on demand for non-medical reasons—feticide or does that term only apply to female fetuses? If the latter, what is the justification for the distinction?

In a statement to a conference, Prime Minister Singh said.

“This is a national shame and we must face this challenge squarely here and now,” Prime Minister Manmohan Singh told a conference on ways to “Save the girl child.”
“No nation, no society, no community can hold its head high and claim to be part of the civilised world if it condones the practice of discriminating against one half of humanity represented by women,” Singh said.

Sadly, the ratios of female to male births in some of the more affluent sections of the State of Punjab, India are as low as three hundred per thousand births. The nature of this travesty has in part been blamed on the ability of only a male heir being allowed to light the funeral pyre of deceased parents, and the male children's ability to care for the parents in their old age. The real question though is raised obliquely by Shirish Pareth in a quote above. If their is a distinction to be made about the travesty of nearly one hundred million girls who are "missing", what is to be said of the numbers of all children who are missing?

The issue of abortion is emotionally charged regardless of which side of the fence we sit on. Pro Choice or Pro Life. The staggering numbers of children who are "missing" in India have much to do with the vast population involved, I for one, being male, have little stake in the issue. But the numbers of children who simply were and the weren't are just mind boggling to me. And this doesn't even begin to touch the issue in the most populous nation on the planet, China, where the one child limit has been an official policy and in place since 1979.

From the Wikipedia article on China's One Child Policy:

In February 2008 Chinese Government official Wu Jianmin said that the one-child policy would be reconsidered during the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference in March 2008,[3] but at that time a representative of China's National Population and Family Planning Commission said that the policy would remain in place for at least another decade

And for all of the Pro Choice readers, do be aware that i have attempted to not take a side in this case, but to merely report the issue of the Indian Prime Minister taking a stand regarding the discriminatory practise of aborting female vs. male babies disproportionately.
Don't shoot the messenger, unless you just have to, (figuratively) in which case go ahead (figuratively please.)