The Hindu : Tamil Nadu News : Female foeticide prevalent among affluent groups

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Sunday, Dec 17, 2006
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Tamil Nadu

Tamil Nadu

Female foeticide prevalent among affluent groups

Staff Reporter

"It is a crime for which doctors must be held responsible"

CHENNAI: Female foeticide is most prevalent among urban dwellers and affluent groups, said speakers at a media workshop on the subject here on Friday.

Female foeticide or the termination of a foetus after determining its sex should be treated as a crime for which doctors were responsible and must not loosely classified as a 'social evil,' they said.

The sex of a child can be determined in the fourth month of pregnancy and abortion at that stage posed great risk to the mother's life.

The districts that had the lowest sex ratios of below 880 girls to every 1000 boys were also among the top twenty per cent of affluent districts, said Sathish Agnihotri, Transport Commissioner from Orissa. Before the 1980s, when ultrasound was not available, the falling sex ratios could be attributed to neglect and infanticide.

The urban centres of Delhi, Kolkata, Mumbai and Chennai had falling sex ratios. Among the Scheduled Caste communities, which traditionally had healthy sex ratios, the practice was becoming more prevalent due to the emulation of upper caste practices, he said.

Violence against women

Donna Fernandez, working with Vimochana, a nongovernmental organisation in Bangalore, said that sex-selective abortion was higher in areas that had other forms of violence against women such as dowry deaths.

Bangalore accounted for 100 dowry deaths a month. Self-help groups were also indirectly contributing to the problem by providing women with access to credit, she said. Puneet Bedi, from Apollo Hospitals, Delhi, said that more female foetuses were destroyed annually in the city than the number of girl children produced in Denmark each year.

Such abortion was also a leading cause of maternal mortality.

The World Health Organisation did not recommend routine ultrasound, he said.

The family planning programme initiated by the government had contributed to the problem till as recently as 1979 by providing ultrasound scanning and abortion facilities in government hospitals, he said.

Journalists from across the country attended the workshop, held as part of the alumni meeting of the Asian College of Journalism here.

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