DIRTY SEX
May you be the mother of a hundred sons.' That's a popular wedding blessing in many parts of India. It aptly captures a notorious feature of Indian society: son preference. This is accompanied by a cruel aversion for daughters. When the punishment is light, women in Indian live with monstrous inequalities, when the society is at its gruesome worst, girl children are snuffed out in the womb.
In its January 8 issue, the uk- based medical journal The Lancet reported that prenatal selection and selective abortions claim more than 500,000 girl foetuses every year in India. The study claimed to provide the first conclusive links between amniocenteses and India's horrifically skewed sex ratio. Its alarming conclusions actually substantiated what many social scientists and activists have held for long: laws to proscribe sex determination remain woefully inadequate in India.
The origins of offspring sex selection, and the exact numbers of pregnancies involved, have been hotly debated since the early 1990s, when the economist Amartya Sen called attention to the phenomenon of the "missing women'. However, many social scientists do agree that historically the practice was linked to the system of hypergamy: families had to marry off their women into a social group above their own. Among the uppermost castes, this was impossible. Equally unthinkable were notions that the rules of hypergamy could be transgressed or that girls could remain unmarried, thus girls in these groups were killed, and boys married females from sub-castes slightly lower than their own. According to sociologist Alice Clark, female infanticide was also a fall out of upper caste households using dowry to augment land holdings: daughters as dowry-takers, were clearly a liability in this scheme of things.
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| Married off at the age of 13, Rajbala's reproductive journey began six months later. At 27 today, she is pregnant yet again, even though the youngest of her six daughters is barely 5 months old. Misdiagnosed by an ultrasound technician in the past, this time she can only pray that her mother-in-law's insistence for a male child is fulfilled. For now, she dresses up her girls as boys |
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