India: In 20 Years' Time, 10 Million Baby Girls Killed

[red_jon]

Originally posted by Gatekeeper
eople can justify this is beyond me. The last line in the story is telling: " ... these are people who would visit all the female deities and pray for strength but don't hesitate to kill a girl child."

Just have to hope said deities get their own back...

[aneeshm]

Ouch! This is despicable and sick beyond what words can express.

But the double standard is also evident here - when abortions are done in the Western world, all the "liberals" come out in defence of the right to choice. When that same choice is exercised for some goal of which liberals disapprove, then they're against it. Stick with one thing or face the hypocrite label.

The killing baby girls bit is, of course, unequivocally condemnable (and condemned, at least by me).

I wish religious leaders are more successful in convincing people like this that infanticide and feticide (aka abortion) is an abomination (according to orthodox scriptural tradition). These leaders all say that don't kill the girl child, don't abort the baby just because she is a girl, but nobody listens to them, people just go on in their regressive entrenched ways . It's ironic that the reforms are coming from the religious establishment, and the opposition from the people - in other religions, it's usually the other way around.

And the article is also exaggerating beyond belief. The whole of society is not ruthlessly hunting down the girl child, it is some part of some people in some regions of the country which are already the most regressive culturally who are the source of the problem.

[dannubis]

In the west it is NOT allowed to have an abortion just because it is a girl as far as i know.

Apologist!

[DinoDoc]

Originally posted by dannubis
In the west it is NOT allowed to have an abortion just because it is a girl as far as i know.

Says who?

[KrazyHorse]

Maybe in Euroland it's not...

[aneeshm]

Originally posted by dannubis
In the west it is NOT allowed to have an abortion just because it is a girl as far as i know.

Apologist!

In case you didn't get it, I am explicitly against this practice - but I'm also against double standards. It is perfectly permissible in the West (which cannot be treated as a monolithic entity, but is being so treated for now) to abort a baby within a certain time period for any reason whatsoever.

[DinoDoc]

Well its not even a person (legally. I obviously feel otherwise.), I'm just curious how dannubis and or Euroland draws a distinction between a girl non-person vs a boy non-person.

[Geronimo]

Originally posted by dannubis
In the west it is NOT allowed to have an abortion just because it is a girl as far as i know.

Apologist!

Where you live is abortion regulated? Under what sort of situations is it permitted?

[KrazyHorse]

Originally posted by DinoDoc
Well its not even a person (legally. I obviously feel otherwise.), I'm just curious how dannubis and or Euroland draws a distinction between a girl non-person vs a boy non-person.

I don't know. They have weird laws over there about baguettes and holocaust denial.

Anyhow, where I'm from there are no laws regulating abortion whatsoever. A mother may abort the fetus at any time for any reason (technically until the moment of birth, but I doubt she'd find a doctor to perform the procedure unless it was absolutely necessary beyond a certain point in the third trimester).

[Deity Dude]

In the US in most areas you can have an abortion no questions asked. So if you did want to do it due to the sex of the baby you could.

Whats going on in India is attrocious but look at US stats for a second:


US averages about 1.2 million abortions annually. With a population of 300 million citizens. Thats about 4.0 per 1000 citizens per year. After 20 years that amounts to 24 million.

Indias pop is about 1,095 million with .6 million of these. Thats about 0.5 per 1000. That 10 million after 20 years.

4.0 per 1000 in the US vs 0.5 per 1000 in India

I think we should be worried about ourselves before we start telling India what to do.

[KrazyHorse]

0.5 simply represents the number of excess female abortions (or infanticides...which is of course much more reprehensible).

The article did not mention the overall abortion rate.

While on an individual scale I do not see selective abortion as being immoral (since I do not believe that fetuses are persons) it can become a social problem when practiced on large scale. A large excess of males can and will lead to a raft of undesirable effects.

[Proteus_MST]

Originally posted by Geronimo

Where you live is abortion regulated? Under what sort of situations is it permitted?

In germany you have to get a receipt that you attended to a psychological consultation before you are allowed to perform an abortion.
Only if the patient has such a receipt it is legally possible for the doc to perform the abortion (and even then only until the 12th week of pregnancy).

If you openly state that you want to abort the child because it is a girl you probably would never get the receipt but instead have the consultant try everything to convince you to bear the child
(you could state other reasons however, for example your financial situation, which would lead to the consultant still trying to convince you that other alternatives are better [for example giving your child for adoption after birth] but in the end he would give you the receipt)

[dannubis]

Thank you Proteus. I am still at work so I only saw all the answers now, but this is precisely what I meant.

However, the loopholes in the system are big enough to allow an elephant to walk through.

[Geronimo]

Originally posted by KrazyHorse
0.5 simply represents the number of excess female abortions (or infanticides...which is of course much more reprehensible).

The article did not mention the overall abortion rate.

While on an individual scale I do not see selective abortion as being immoral (since I do not believe that fetuses are persons) it can become a social problem when practiced on large scale. A large excess of males can and will lead to a raft of undesirable effects.

Is person status dependent on some sort of minimum criteria list for you?

Maybe a person must have either biological independance, or the ability to reason or both of these?

I admit I'm a bit creeped out when someone doesn't see a very late term abortion for non-life saving reasons to be immoral. Not to say that I necessarily find it any more creepy than the people who ascribe person status to a frozen zygote in a -80 freezer.

[Gatekeeper]

Originally posted by Eli
And that's 10 million over 20 years. As horrible as it is, I don't think it would affect India very much.

Hmm. Well, according to the story: "Chowdhury said the fall in the number of females had cost one percent of India's GDP and created shortages of girls in some states like Haryana, where in one case four brothers had to marry one woman."

I suppose a loss of 1 percent in a nation's GDP isn't horrible, depending, of course, on the size of its economy. Still, vast parts of India are not that well-developed as it is, so any loss of GDP due to *preventable* factors is a shame, considering it could be used to improve the lives of the aforementioned folks living in those regions.

Gatekeeper