DISAPPEARING DAUGHTERS, A BOOK BY GITA ARAVAMUDAN
A news item in Agence France-Presse by Parul Gupta says: “India’s unwanted girls have been drowned in milk, burned alive in sealed mud pots or fed milk laced with poisonous seeds, but these days it is much easier to kill them in the womb.” Aravamudan’s book describes stories of women forced to endure successive pregnancies to produce male children, and of others forced to have up to four abortions in five years.
The book describes different aspects of this social ill. They kill girls and therefore have difficulty finding brides; in many cases brides are shared and one 18 year old woman was killed by her husband because she refused to have sex with his brother. According to the author, female feticide is like the holocaust.
Here is a bit of India. Thirty plastic bags containing the remains of aborted fetuses and newborn babies have been found in a pit in Orissa. This is most likely an act of a private medical clinic, which the police have still to establish. India loses an average of 7,000 girls per day.