From: dbailey@cix.clink.co.UK (Diane Bailey)
Newsgroups: soc.feminism
Subject: "Our Daughters Must Die" - Infanticide in India
Date: 4 Sep 92 22:32:24 GMT
Reply-To: dbailey@cix.clink.co.UK

Some women of Indian background have said that they find this
subject distressing.  Clearly one understands that and would
suggest they read no further.

[Moderator's note: I have spliced together two articles that Diane
Bailey sent me, because the citation she gave for the article was
separated from the article itself.  --CTM]

------spliced in article
Since starting this thread I have been away twice and not had the
time to post.  On reading the subsequent postings I am dismayed
to find how people have assumed that western issues are involved
in the problem and have not apparently tried to inform themselves
before posting.  No one has even emailed me for more information
before opining that the undervaluing of women's work is at the
root of it all, or that it is down to economic oppression by the
West.

This is costing millions of lives (one estimate is that nearly 30
million women are missing from India's current population).  The
problem may already be in western countries.  Can we discuss this
with a view to a way of changing the situation?

In discussing this problem people should realise that the people
are usually Hindu, a religion which maintains that to be a woman
is a cursed state - that a good life will mean reincarnation as a
higher being (a man) and a bad one a return as a woman or an even
lesser creature.  Even so, to kill a woman, or to kill a child
are named sins of great gravity under the religion.  This is not
to say that those of other religions behave differently.

As everywhere murder is of course illegal, but cremation is the
standard form of disposal of the dead and it is normally done by
the family, and rapidly, for health reasons.  Shortage of money
is always said to be the reason for sparse administration -
although India has had a recent success in its space rocket
program.

It should also be known that the demand for a dowry -
theoretically illegal although the law is not enforced - has been
around for a long time (it used indeed to be common in western
societies) but has recently beome an increasingly vicious problem
as demands amongst the middle classes have reached astronomic
proportions.  This is probably filtering down the class
structure.  It is not uncommon for families to kill a
daughter-in-law that they feel has not brought sufficient dowry
with her, and for other families to then be quite willing to
offer their daughters, with yet more dowry, in replacement.  Even
where the woman is herself a high earner a large dowry is
required from her parents, and such valuable side benefits as the
prospect of citizenship of a western country by marriage for a
husband do not apparently reduce the dowry demanded from a
bride's parents.  Thus the value of the woman's labour has
unfortunately no bearing on the matter. As you will read below,
even women doctors fail to see their own daughters' lives in
terms other than those attendent to a marriage.

There are women's organisations in India, which have had
successes.  This problem unfortunately seems just too large for
them.

The Indian High Commission in London had NOTHING TO SAY on the
subject.

I would have posted more detail in the first place but that all I
then had was copyright.  Yesterday I found a posting on
soc.culture.indian, titled "Female infanticide rampant in Tamil
Nadu", which was excerpted from an article by Pushpa Iyengar in
the Times of India, Bombay, 23 August 1992, and forwarded it to
soc.feminism.  Unfortunately our moderators have rejected it, for
the second time they tell me, and suggested a summmary.  Instead
I am attempting a rewrite.  I have augmented the story with
information from UNICEF and the London weekly The Observer.

The original article was written by an Indian journalist who had
been researching in the Tamil Nadu state of India for several
weeks and found people reluctant to talk.  On adopting the cover
of being a women's studies researcher, and moving to another
district, she suddenly found that people would talk and,
shockingly, that they would talk in public without anyone
expressing any surprise, shock or disagreement.

My rewrite follows as "Our Daughters Must Die" - Infanticide in
India

Diane
dbailey@cix.compulink.co.uk
-------spliced in article

"For the sake of my family, I will continue to kill all female
babies that I deliver till I get a boy," said Shakuntala, 30, the
wife of an agricultural worker, before the entire village. Her
second baby, her second female child, was killed four years ago.
At three days old, her mother-in-law had fed the child poison. "I
felt bad, but I had to think of her future which would have been
bleak since we could not afford another dowry," she said.  None of
the 50 or more villagers around even winced at the confession.

Government officials say that only creating awareness will
solve this problem of female infanticide, but it was easy to find
an entire village that was perfectly well aware and treated the
killing of unwanted female babies as the only logical solution to
the dowry menace.  Another neighbour explained: "Even if
Shakuntala had decided to let her second daughter live with the
idea of giving equal portions of what she could afford to both
daughters, it would not have worked", she said.  Boys are rarely
offered in marriage to families where there is more than one girl
because their share of dowry goes down.  The fact that women get
progressively weaker through child-bearing, trying for that prized
son, does not deter these women.  They see it as their obligation
to their families.

They will not consider giving up their unwanted girl babies for
adoption.  A prominent gynaecologist advised adoption to her
patients, but with no success: "These women tell me that as long
as they know their girls alive they will continue to worry.  They
fear that the girls might be exploited as servants, or worse,
forced into prostitution.  They prefer to live with the sorrow of
their daughter's deaths.  But they don't feel any guilt".

Never guilt, emphasises another woman doctor, who runs her own
hospital a few miles away.  "I support the policy of female
infanticide and refuse to admit that it is a sin", she says
forcefully. The only advice she offers women giving birth to a
second or another female child.  "If you are going to kill it,
don't do it in my hospital".

Doctors are familiar with the syndrome of girl babies who have
mysteriously died days after being born perfectly healthy.  For
example, a woman who gave birth to her third female child after a
caesarian and had gone through agony. On the eighth day, her
mother-in-law took away the baby, saying that the horoscope said
that the mother and child should be seperated for their well
being.  When the woman came back for a check-up she told the
doctor that her baby had died.

The dowry is only one reason why female infanticide is practised.
According to the local Communist Party secretary, the wealthy
resort to this gruesome practice because they do not want their
property fragmented.  Most of these communities usually give
their daughters in marriage to relatives and thereby ensure that
property stays within the family.  But having more than two
daughters would mean having to find a groom from outside the
family circle, and giving away a part of the property as dowry to
an outsider.

According to the doctor, parents often see their adult daughters
being tortured by mother-in-laws and husbands.  "Instead of
seeing them being killed after nurturing them, we may kill them
as babies", is her logic.  She has little time for people who
lecture about social ills against woman. "Has anything been done
to better the lot of woman?  Can the government guarantee that
our daughters will not be tortured by their in-laws?", she asks.
Another woman felt she had to kill her daughter because she had
the additional handicap of being born without a leg.  The mother
wept for two whole days, "Do you think these mothers are cruel?
They have to kill because society is against women.  These
mothers have suffered so much that they don't want the pattern
repeating in their daughters' lives.  They are not committing
murder", the doctor says.  She herself underwent a sterilisation
operation after she had a son.  "I could not risk having a girl
and then see her suffer", she says.

One of her male collegues has two daughters and a son.  His
oldest daughter was married to a relative, who turned out to be
an alcoholic and a wife-beater.  She is now back with him.
"After seeing my daughter's life ruined in this fashion, I
definitely advocate female infanticide", he says.  The fact that
his second daughter is happily married in no way compensates for
his first-born's misfortune.

Where villages do not admit that female infanticide is practised,
the size of families and the lack of contraception or
sterilisation tell another story.  It came across quite clearly
during talks with people in tiny hamlets that most families had
at the most two children.  Few of these families had undergone
sterilisation operations. No other methods of contraception are
used. Abortions are not always possible because of the expense.
The practice, which has been going on for hundreds of years has
not abated, indeed it is being emulated by other communities who
have settled in the area from outside.

Scan facilities are now available in major towns.  If the foetus
is female, woman have abortions, if necessary going to
back-street quacks, despite the high risk to the mother.
Sometimes those scan facilities are openly advertised in terms
that can only be interpreted as an incitement to save the cost of
a dowry.  One associated clinic in Bombay aborted 7,999 females
in 8,000 cases (UNICEF information).  The one exception was
Jewish.  For these who cannot afford that, there are several ways
of killing a child after birth.  Feeding the newborn baby paddy
grains in hot milk, turning the new born over after covering its
face with a wet towel, drowning her in a bucket of water,
smothering the infant with pillows, feeding her pesticide,
overdosing her with sleeping pills, or filling the nose with wet
sand after administering a dose of opium are among the methods
used.

A study by the Community Services Guild of Madras found that 51
per cent of the families belonging to some communities killed the
second and later female children within the first week of birth.

Obviously post-mortems, murder prosecutions, a ban on
sex-disclosing by scan clinics, and enforcement of dowry
legislation would deal largely with the problems.  But there seems
no will.  I think this should be an international feminist issue,
what do you think?


Diane
dbailey@cix.compulink.co.uk

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