Category: Articles

Writer and researcher Gita Aravamudan describes how female babies were killed in villages in India:

“Female infanticide I found had become more “scientific”. Inducing pneumonia was the modern method. The infant was wrapped in a wet towel or dipped in cold water as soon as it was born or when it came back home from the hospital. If, after a couple of hours, it was still alive it was taken to a doctor who would diagnose pneumonia and prescribe medicine, which the parents promptly threw away. When the child finally died, the parents had a medical certificate to prove pneumonia. Sometimes the infant was fed a drop of alcohol to create diarrhea: another “certifiable disease.”

Gita Aravamudan Disappearing Daughters: the Tragedy of Female Foeticide (New Delhi, India: Penguin Books India, 2007)22

They did this because bodies could be exhumed so killing had to be done stealthily

“Better to Let Blood Flow like a River Than to Have One More Than Allowed.”

“You Can Beat It out! You Can Make It Fall Out!  You Could Abort it! But You Cannot Give Birth to It.”

Posters set up by local authorities in Chinese villages supporting the one child policy.

Mara Hvistendahl Unnatural Selection: Choosing Boys over Girls, and the Consequences of a World Full of Men (New York: Public Affairs, 2011) 142

On infanticide in India:

“There are about 535,000 traditional birth attendants in Bihar for a population of 100 million. In several districts of the state, [the researcher] found that each midwife killed as many as 5 newborn girls a month. The study, released in 1995, was in a formal exercise, but [the researchers] believe that “if anything, the survey underestimated infanticide.”

An organization called Adithi, founded by Vigia Srinivasan, did the research.

Miriam Jordan “Brief Lives” Wall Street Journal, May 9, 2000