Female Feticide: A Dark Face of Indian Society

Female feticide--the selective abortion of female fetuses--is killing upwards of one million females in India annually with far-ranging and tragic consequences.

In some areas, the sex ratio of females to males has dropped to less than 943:1000  (It is 943females on 1000 Males).This is evident from the declining sex ratio which has dropped to alarming levels, especially in the northern states according to Census 2011 reports. Women are murdered all over the world. But in India a most brutal form of killing females takes place regularly, even before they have the opportunity to be born.

The proliferation and abuse of advanced technologies coupled with social factors contributing to the low status of women such as dowry, concerns with family name and looking up to the son as a breadwinner has made the evil practice of female feticide to become common in the middle and higher socio-economic households, especially in the northern states.  Females not only face inequality in this culture, they are even denied the right to be born. Why do so many families selectively abort baby daughters? Although female infanticide has long been committed in India, feticide is a relatively new practice, emerging concurrently with the advent of technological advancements in prenatal sex determination on a large scale in the 1990s. While abortion is legal in India, it is a crime to abort a pregnancy solely because the fetus is female. This article aims at making it clear that gender selective abortions have to be viewed as a social issue rather than a women issue.