Female Foeticide

What is Female foeticide-
Female foeticide is the process of finding out the sex of the foetus and undergoing abortion if it is a girl. Although it is illegal, many people continue to practice it.

Besides this, there are some communities which practice female infanticide - the practice of killing the girl child once she is born.

This practice needs to be stopped as both girls and boys have an equal right to live. In order to do this, it is necessary to protect their rights by prohibiting practices like dowry, female unemployment, child marriage and caste discrimination.

What the law says about female foeticide and female infanticide
According to certain sections of the Indian Penal Code, forced abortion, causing death of an unborn child or intentionally preventing a child being born alive are punishable offences. Besides this, the Pre-natal Diagnostic Techniques (Regulation and Prevention of Misuse) Act, considers engaging in sex selective abortion using pre-natal diagnostic techniques as a punishable offence.

Role of panchayat members in stopping female foeticide and female infanticide

1.Panchayat members should give accurate information on the laws concerned to this issue.
2.Find out where it is being practiced in the village and investigate it immediately.
3.Register all births and deaths under the purview of the panchayatraise awareness about gender sensitivity through public education programmes.

4.Prevent female foeticide with assistance from the ANM and local mid-wife.

Women are murdered all over the world. But in India a most brutal form of killing females takes place regularly, even before they have the opportunity to be born. Female feticide-the selective abortion of female fetuses-is killing upwards of one million females in India annually with far-ranging and tragic consequences. In some areas, the sex ratio of females to males has dropped to less than 8000:1000. Females not only face inequality in this culture, they are even denied the right to be born.

Female feticide has replaced female infanticide as a means to reduce or eliminate female offspring. In societies where women's status is very low, many female fetuses are rejected. Thus, at least 100 million of the total number of aborted female fetuses have been victims of female feticide. This number is based on a predicted ratio of boy-to-girl births and does not take into account the male and female fetuses that are aborted for non-gender-based reasons.

Why do so many families selectively abort baby daughters?
In a word: Aborting female fetuses is both practical and socially acceptable in India. Female feticide is driven by many factors, but essentially by the prospect of having to pay a dowry to the future bridegroom of a daughter. While sons offer security to their families in old age and can perform the rites for the souls of dead parents and ancestors, daughters are recognized as a social and economic burden.

Prenatal sex detection technologies have been misused, allowing the selective abortions of female offspring to growth. Legally, however, female feticide is a penal offence. Although female infanticide has long been committed in India, feticide is a relatively new practice, emerging concurrently with the arrival of technological advancements in prenatal sex determination on a large scale in the 1990s. While abortion is legal in India, it is a crime to abort a pregnancy simply because the fetus is female.

Strict laws and penalties are in place for violators. These laws, however, have not arrived from the tide of this abhorrent practice.