Gender Ratios & Sex-Selective Practices
The ratio of female to male youth in India is progressively and consistently declining. This decline is due to a number of factors.
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The methods by which the female youth population is limited due to daughter aversion, or son preference, are numerous. Infanticides, abortions, and sterilizations are among the most widely employed actions that accomplish this limitation.
Making policies regarding sex-selective abortion in rural India is difficult because of the varied reasons for which women have abortions, such as health complications or simply not being ready for a child, and the lack of concrete ability to prove the reason for any given abortion. Regardless, the current prevalence of practices such as female infanticide and sex-selective abortion demonstrates the relevance of son preference in rural India.
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*Image: Large sign in an Indian clinic reading "Prenatal disclosure of sex of foetues is prohibited under law" in English and Hindi. Female infanticide is still a major problem in India.
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Meg and Rahul, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 2.0.
Child sex ratios in India. Attribution: On Being, CC BY-NC-SA 2.0, Flickr.
Maharashtra, India
Abortion & Adolescent Mothers
In a study conducted in rural Maharashtra, of a collection of about 225 adolescent girls interviewed who had an abortion, more than one-fifth of them had the abortion specifically to avoid having a female child (Ganatra 76). Abortion is a potential ‘solution,’ for lack of a better word, that many women consider when they discover the gender of their child.
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The dilemma concerning whether to allow female abortion raises issues concerning reproductive rights in societies with prevalent gender discrimination such as those of rural India; the question arises whether women in rural India, given access to abortion, would make the decision to abort based on the sex of the offspring (Oomman 185).
Tamil Nadu, India
Infanticide & Daughter Aversion
In a collection of individual interviews of women conducted across rural Tamil Nadu, a southern state in India, it was found that 77% of respondents with two daughters wanted no more children (Diamond-Smith 704). Many who had two or more female children got sterilized either with or without their husbands’ knowledge due to the “risk” of bearing another daughter if they tried for a son. The fact that women considered bearing daughters a risk suggests that in rural Tamil Nadu, female children can be considered a burden and therefore undesirable.
In another study, “of [a population of] 13,000 [in the village]... there were a total of… 759 live births of which 378 were male and 381 female. Among the cohort of live born infants, 56 died in the period of two and a half years… and… the male to female mortality ratio was about 3:4… Of these deaths, 19 were confirmed infanticides…” (George 1154), all of which were female deaths.
To mitigate the frequency of sex-selective abortion, solutions would have to include changing women’s outlook on having female children.
Parental and Community Investment
Son preference also manifests in the form of decreased parental investment in and communal mistreatment of female children.
*Image: Duli Bai sitting outside her home in the rural Dungapur district of India’s northwest state of Rajasthan. Married at 12, she has now been a widow for 14 years. Like other women who have lost their husbands – often because of staggering age gaps, since they were still girls when they were married to much older men – she faces a range of discrimination and stigma that can limit her personal choices and access to public services.
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Photo credit: UN Women / Gaganjit Singh, Flickr, CC BY-NC-ND 2.0
The effect of parental investment on early childhood development is staggering.
Punjab, India
Daughter Aversion & Societal Factors
A study in a village in rural Punjab found that while the mortality rate during the neonatal period is higher for boys than girls, the mortality rate of girls exceeds that of boys for children between 1 and 59 months old. In fact, the mortality rate of girls in the study was double that of boys for children 1 to 23 months old (Gupta 81).
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This evidence supports the notion that daughter aversion is a real and concerning problem in rural India. Once children reach 1 month of age, parental and communal actions become far more important and consequential than natural or biological factors in determining their opportunities for success, or in this case, even survival.
Parental discrimination against female children could be a contributing factor to female child mortality and less access to resources for women. When female children are not afforded sufficient nutrition and care, their health is already likely to be far worse than that of male children.
In traditional, patriarchal societies in rural India, women have historically married earlier than men, had less autonomy, often had less access to health services (yet were more frequently malnourished because food allocation is prioritized for male members of a family), and had less access to education and employment, which continues to this day (Sarap 458). For this reason, males often have greater opportunities for mobility than do women.
The gender disparities in communal and parental investment in children demonstrates the disturbingly consequential effect of son preference on rural Indian societies.
*Image: Worker woman in a construction site in Bhubaneshwar- Orissa- India.
Credit: Carla Antonini, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0
"When God created man and woman, he was thinking, 'Who shall I give the power to, to give birth to the next human being?' And God chose woman. And this is the big evidence that women are powerful."
-Malala Yousafzai
*Image: Women working in their rice paddy fields in Odisha, India. Trócaire works with communities to help them access government support. (Photo: Justin Kernoghan).
Credit: Trocaire, Wikimedia Commons, CC by 2.0