It's A Girl!

IT’S A GIRL!

“It’s a girl!” Why, very often, do these words ring a death knell in an Indian maternity clinic? The baby girl is perfectly formed, she is in excellent health, her APGAR score is fine, her birth weight could not be better and yet, a pall of gloom descends around the labour room when these words leave the attending doctor’s mouth. This is the reaction of the average Indian couple and more so if it is their second child after having had a daughter earlier. If, after two daughters, it is their third attempt at procreation, then it is as if someone has died and everyone goes into mourning because the whole aim of having a third child after two daughters was to have a son!

Indian history is full of instances where the mid wife was paid extra to quietly get rid of an unwanted baby girl either by burying her alive or by inserting a tiny grain of raw rice into an even tinier nostril or by literally drenching and drowning her in cow’s milk. This, of course, was much before the advent of sophisticated tests which tell you the sex of your child when it is just a three month old foetus. When amniocentesis came into the picture, around the late seventies or early eighties, it was meant as a diagnostic tool to detect Down’s Syndrome and give the parents a chance to terminate the pregnancy if they felt they would be unable to care for a ‘special’ child.

Indian couples began thinking of an amniotic test as their personal tool to get rid of female foetuses. For a while all was well in female foeticide land and mothers and mothers in law, fathers and fathers in law gleefully welcomed male child after male child into their families while the souls of all the female foetuses that the daughters and daughters in law and the sons and sons in law had terminated hung like ghostly spectres around their houses. Not that they even noticed! They were too busy rejoicing over that ultimate pinnacle of human achievement in Indian psyche: that of having produced a male child, by hook or by crook!

Then the government stepped in, albeit too late for many never to be born baby girls, and amniotic tests were strictly banned in India unless there was a very real fear that the unborn baby might test positive for Down’s syndrome. This, of course, was left at the doctor’s discretion and certain doctors in India were paid to be very discreet! Still, by and large, baby girls began to be born again.

But the joy and sanctity of maintaining a balanced sex ratio as intended by Mother Nature, (yes we call her ‘Mother’ though few people want a daughter!) was short lived because technology brought to the fore the sonography or the ultra sound machine! Gone was the need for inserting long needles into the uterus to extract amniotic fluid, gone was the slight chance that the doctor had wrongly diagnosed the sex of the unborn babe and a male foetus had been terminated by mistake. Horror of horrors! Now the mother to be had to just lie down and relax while the radiologist smeared cool gel over her abdomen, followed by the smooth head of the ultra sound machine. The babe was exposed on the screen monitor in all its naked glory, blissfully unaware that its sex would decide, in the next few minutes, whether it would live or die.

Again female foetuses began to be aborted as fast as an ultra sound could be done, the ratio kept getting worse and worse until one fine day the government woke up and banned doctors from disclosing the sex of the child after performing an ultra sound and from agreeing to terminate a pregnancy if it happened to be a girl child. But clandestine operations to murder our unborn girl children continued and the portable ultra sound machine came as a blessing in disguise to greedy individuals who began making a good living solely by going from hospital to hospital or home to home guaranteeing to bid good riddance to the female foetus. Sadly this continues even today despite a massive clamp down on this abhorrent practice by the government. Everywhere else in the world, couples happily find out the sex of their child, if they want to, and begin planning the nursery and the baby wardrobe based on pink or blue, as it may be. In Africa, the sex is disclosed to all but the vast Asian community that is based there. The hospitals and doctors have become wise to the fact that very often pink means terminate, as far as people from the sub continent are concerned.

The question is: ‘Why?’ Why would anyone want to hanker so desperately for a male child? Why is the need to have a son so deeply rooted in the Indian mind? Why are girls in many Indian families still being given a lower status as compared to the boys?

We can go back to our mythologies and our folk tales and we realize the blessing given to a married woman was always ‘may you have eight sons’, ‘may you never be widowed’! This clearly points to the fact that the importance of the male was continuously reinforced whether as a son or as a husband. Women were automatically given the second rung of the ladder to stand on. Women got married, took their share of ‘stree dhan’, now termed as dowry, and moved away to their husbands’ house. The sons remained with their parents and became the way to economic and spiritual salvation. Old parents could depend on their son to earn and feed them and after their death the son ensured that all the elaborate last rites were performed in the correct manner. The parents died happy knowing their son had worked hard to guarantee the liberation of their souls! Ah Moksh! What utter bliss!

That was then. Why this regressive attitude in today’s day and age? Why, when the girl can be given an equally good education, when she is proving herself to be more than capable of earning? Why, when a good pension plan and adequate hospital insurance is the only economic crutch one needs in old age? Why, when an electronic button ensures your cremation and subsequent liberation? As the daughter of parents who very happily had two daughters in the mid seventies and declared their family complete, I am still looking for these answers.

Here are some ‘first hand’ examples to prove that women may have gone to the moon, to outer space and back but it has not made an iota of difference to the archetypal Indian mentality.

When my younger sister was born and my delighted Dad distributed ‘Jalebis’ to his colleagues in the army mess, he was met with incredulous looks! A few officers even went so far as to say,’ Sorry we had heard you just had a second daughter. Obviously we got the wrong news. You seem to have had a son since you are giving us sweet meats!’ My Dad happily corrected them saying he had, indeed been blessed with another daughter but she was healthy, hale and hearty and his wife was alive! What more could he ask God for!

When my daughter was born, a nurse hesitantly ventured to say that I should have had a son. I assume she was hesitant because since it was my first child it did not matter all that much as we still had a ‘second chance’ as per the stereotypical way of thinking. I scolded her roundly and told her I did not want to hear such nonsense. My answer remains etched on my mind even sixteen years after that momentous day.” India needs her girls! Look at our skewed sex ratio. Please do not say such things.” The lady in question did not dare to say a word to me after that!

Only after my son was born,( we would have welcomed a second daughter just as happily), did the old lady who bathed both my new borns and had bathed me as a baby too, disclose that she and my grandmother had hoped that the child born after me would be a son! In fact they had just assumed it would be one and were surprised when another girl, my sister, was churned out! She was a simple, uneducated, poverty stricken lady but her thinking and my educated, rich grandmother’s thinking were completely aligned in this matter of being son centric.

And till we have laws in place where the girl and the boy share the wedding expenses equally, where the girl can economically support her parents if the need arises even after she gets married, where girls are encouraged to retain their maiden name if they so choose, till stringent laws are made to punish those that commit the heinous crime of  female foeticide, till people change their mindset, black clouds of disappointment  will continue to hover in labour rooms across India when the doctor announces:

It’s A Girl!

Stark Facts

70 districts in 16 states in India had a 50 + decline in the Child Sex Ratio.

50 million girls and women are missing from India’s population as a result of gender discrimination.

10 million female foetuses were aborted in India over the past twenty years.