Researchers have used government data to find that nine million girls went ‘missing’ in 20 years in India. https://thewire.in/women/india-missing-girls-sex-ratio-infanticide-pew-analysis 

These girls are said to be ‘missing’ because they should have been born and become part of the population – but didn’t because the foetuses were aborted. According to the centre’s report, Hindus alone ‘lost’ some 7.8 million girls.

The paper stated that “as many as 0.48 million girls per annum were selectively aborted during 1995-2005”. Further:

“For a given sex history of births, substantially more sex selection was conducted post-ultrasound by families with wealth (top 20%) and relatively educated women (attaining at least secondary education) and, conditional on wealth and education, by Hindus as compared with Muslims.”

The paper called the practice of sex-selective abortions among educated women “striking” and the concentration of girls in more prosperous households a “challenge” to “the popular notion that the exercise of son preference is a marker of economic backwardness and ignorance”.

by Banjot Kaur

06/09/2022

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