An eye-opener from the BBC today, reporting on UK charity ActionAid's study on the frightening disparity between numbers of girls and boys in India. In one sample site, there were just 300 girls for every 1,000 boys.
Female foetuses are detected by ultrasound, which costs just a few dollars to perform, and aborted. Other practises include letting baby girls' umbilical cords get infected by heaping dirty soil on them and letting the girls die of septicaemia.
In other cultures that favour male children, such as China, there is not an outrageous number of female foetuses aborted; nor is female infanticide as prevalent as in India.
How will India, which has made so many strides to modernise and integrate into the "global economy" deal with this genocide of half its population?
OK, so "genocide" is too strong a word, you argue, and tossed around too casually. In the last 20 years - about a generation - 10 million female foetuses in India have been aborted, according to the esteemed British medical journal Lancet.
What if a Mozzlim nation had anything even near this sort of cultural practise? That's an issue we'll explore tomorrow as we cover an explosive book allegedly written by a Palestinian woman about her experience growing up as a woman in the West Bank.
For now, here's the link to the Indian foeticide/infanticide article:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/south_asia/7466916.stm
(And be sure to check out the side bar on the BBC site for links to seven related articles that round out the story a bit.)
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