An article in the Wall Street Journal describes how some Indian couples are committing infanticide of baby girls, actually killing them outside the womb, rather than screening their pregnancies and getting sex selection abortions.
“In poor and backward places such as Bihar, however, where sonograms are still a rarity, it’s cheaper to kill a newborn girl that to travel to a city and pay for a gender test and an abortion. And Bihar’s gender rate is among the most lopsided in the country. The 1991 census in Bihar showed 912 women for every thousand men, down from 1054 women in 1901. In the district where Dewa is located, the ratio in 1991 was 819 women to 1000 men.
In some pockets of Bihar and Rajasthan, another poor state, the female to male ratio is a meager 600 to 1000. Last August, one village in Rajasthan witnessed its first Hindu wedding procession to a bride’s home in 110 years, because no other girl had been allowed to survive. ”
Miriam Jordan “Brief Lives” Wall Street Journal, May 9, 2000
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