Life & Society Female Feticide | Female Feticide |
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| Sunday, 02 September 2007 | ||||||
Science is knowledge and no science can ever be undone, though any reasonable man might wish that some knowledge such as nuclear weapons had never been developed. The scientist is sometimes blamed by liberal critics for being amoral and bent only on discovery, whatever it takes. That is indeed how it should be. Good science is often based on years of exhaustive research and testing. Good science can have no morality. Moral failure comes with the subsequent misapplication of scientific techniques. Should the scientists who developed prenatal techniques such as ultrasonography and amniocentesis be now blamed for their present woeful misuse in India or China to establish the sex of an unborn child? In both countries male children are preferred as future supporters of the family. Females, especially in India, are unwanted because, among other economic disadvantages, they will carry the expense of a dowry when they marry. Thus the UN reports that a disturbing 2,000 female pregnancies are now being aborted every single day in India. The sex of the unborn child has often been ascertained by ultrasound techniques deployed at clinics established to improve the care of expectant mothers. Thereafter, either outside or, it seems all too often, within the Indian health service there are abortionists willing to commit female feticide. This is illegal without sound medical grounds. But it is all about money, for the clinicians who reveal scan results knowing the risks, for the abortionists who carry out the crime and for the family who see the cost of the female feticide as an investment in a long-term future without an expensive daughter. The immorality of this is clear. What is only now also becoming evident is the radical demographic impact of this behavior. In the 2001 Indian census there were only 800 female to every thousand male births. On the basis of the UN’s estimates of daily female feticide in four years when the next census is taken, the disparity in male/female births will have increased dramatically. This will have serious social consequences. At least two hundred in every thousand men will be unable to find a wife. That will mean 200 fewer families, maybe 400 or 500 fewer children. Some may argue that India needs to control its population and such a check on the birth rate is no bad thing. But what of men who cannot marry? Violence against women is already high. Will it not grow along with vice and the rising mafia which controls it? Historically it has generally been a shortage of men as the result of war that has produced gender imbalances. Plagues and epidemics have not been sexist in their tolls. Though the worrying expense of the female child is nothing new to many societies, including India, and girls have sometimes been murdered at birth, science has given parents the opportunity to carry out the crime earlier and less obviously. But the guilt does not lie with the scientists but with any society that is prepared to permit the technology to be abused so wickedly.
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