The series is about sexism and women's rights in India, and the initial installment leaves plenty of food for thought.
India is facing a shortage of women like Miss Kaur.
In most places in the world, a mother can find out the sex of her unborn child, but in India, it's illegal to do so. That is because if she's a female, there is a good chance she will never be born.
Roughly 6.7 million abortions occur yearly in India, but aborted girls outnumber boys by 500,000 -- or 10 million over the past two decades -- creating a huge imbalance between males and females in the world's largest democracy.
Ironically, a machine used by many pro-life groups in this country to dissuade women from aborting--the ultrasound--is used by women in India and China for sex selection abortions. The high number of abortions in these countries means that the imbalance between the sexes is getting worse, and with that imbalance, women will become more and more valuable...as a commodity.
As a result, a new class of wifeless men are scouring eastern India, Bangladesh and Nepal for available women. India, already a world leader in sex trafficking, is absorbing a new trade in girls kidnapped or sold from their homes and shipped across the country.
Are these women just exercising their right to choose abortion in these situations? If women don't even value their daughters, how can a culture be changed to give those daughters full equality? How do pro-choice supporters handle sex selection abortion as an issue?
The Washington Times story is gut-wrenching. The roadblocks and dangers that Indian women face is staggering. Besides the sex selection abortions, women must deal with the burdensome dowery system that is still in place.
Sister Mary Scaria was one of two girls in a family of nine children.
Dressed in an aqua-colored sari of the Sisters of Charity of Jesus and Mary, the nun is also a lawyer and coordinator of the Delhi Catholic Archdiocese's Justice & Peace Commission. In early 2006, she published "Woman: An Endangered Species?" which charged that "female feticide" is decimating half of the population.
She chiefly blames the dowry system, a Hindu marriage practice by which the groom's family demands enormous sums of money and goods from the bride's family as a condition for letting their son marry her.
"At a wedding, everyone looks to see how many bracelets the bride has and how much gold she has," the nun says. Dowries typically consist of gold and appliances, as well as substantial amounts of cash. Defenders of the system say that girls are often denied an inheritance in India; thus, what she gets at her wedding is in effect a savings account she can retain for the rest of her life.
What actually happens is the groom's family pockets the dowry, the nun explains, and the payments don't stop there.
"When a wife has a baby in India, the wife's family has to pay for the hospital stay," Sister Mary says. "After the birth, they also have to bring gold and food for the new family, even new saris for all the relatives."
Some Indian castes even require that the bride's family pay her funeral expenses when she dies. Worse yet, the groom's family will often kill the bride in what's known as a "dowry death" if they think the dowry is too small.
And even though the dowry system was banned in India back in 1961, the system still remains.
The caste system is still prevalent in India as well. The ratio of women to men is most skewed in the richest provinces. The large number of unmarried men are resorting to importing brides from other areas, and those women are treated little better than slaves. As feminists, the mistreatment of all women--from womb to death--should be a concern.
UPDATE: Deep Thought reminded me in the comments that he addressed this sex ratio imbalance in a post from a year ago.
GPWOW,
ReplyDeleteI would like your feedback on my article on this from a year ago, please.
http://andune.blogspot.com/2006/02/death-and-maidens-as-i-have-discussed.html
Great post, DT. I'm fascinated by the inherent contradictions of feminists who whole-heartedly support abortion any time, any place and can't see that the female feticide in places like China and India is a predictable result of easy access to abortion.
ReplyDeleteThe desire to have only male children is not the result of abortion. If you want to attack the culture for it, fine, but abortion is just a solution for women who already want to bear males. If access to abortion were more limited, what makes you think the rates of female infanticide wouldn't go through the roof?
ReplyDeleteI would assert that if we focused on promoting true feminist ideals in the region (equality in the value and opportunities for people of both sexes), the burden of bearing female children wouldn't be any greater than bearing male children. There would no longer be any reason to abort based on the fetus' gender, and fewer pregnancies would be deemed "unwanted."
I suspect that as the imbalance increases, the perceived value of a female child will increase --- and, eventually, the dowry system will invert itself: men will have to pay women in order to be taken on as a husband.
ReplyDeleteThe thing is, it may be a generation before that happens.
The desire to bear only male children isn't a result of abortion, but abortion makes it easier to realize this twisted vision. Of course the most important thing is to change these cultures so that having female children is not considered a burden, but that will take time (perhaps a generation or two, as Aphrael points out).
ReplyDeleteIt's harder to kill a female infant than to have an abortion. There's also less of a chance of parents being willing to kill their offspring once born. That's where abortion is contributing to the sex ratio imbalance.
So, is this still a woman's right to choose? What if her choice is wrong?
Sharon: nobody else has the power to decide that her choice is wrong. That's a matter for her, her friends and family, and her God.
ReplyDeleteWhy would the fact that the aggregate of choices interposes a short-term cost to the nation make that any less true? If it's an individual right, it's an individual right regardless of what the effect on the nation is; the nation can encourage her to make a different choice, and it can isntitute programs to ameliorate the effects, but it can't make the decision for her.
The aggregate of people's speech choices sometimes harms their nations; but we value the freedom of speech, and the nation adjusts. The same holds true for this.
Of course other people have the power to decide her choice is wrong. That's what laws are for. They are codifications of our morality.
ReplyDeleteOK, that's a fair point, and it means I clearly misstated my position. :)
ReplyDeleteIf you believe that a woman has a fundamental right to choose whether or not to give birth, then it follows that nobody else has the power to make the decision of whether or not to give birth for her. Thus, the fact that her decision may result in deleterious effects for the nation is irrelevant.