10 million female fetuses aborted in India, a study estimates

The Boston Globe reports:

Rajitha Kunchala, the mother of three girls, aborted her fetus more than a year ago after a doctor using ultrasound images found abnormalities, but Kunchala said she would have gotten an abortion anyway -- because she was going to have a girl.

''We really wanted a boy," she said one day last week, her hands around her abdomen. She was six months pregnant. ''Now I'm worried again -- we still want a boy. A boy would take care of his parents, not leave the house, and there is no dowry payment" to be made when a boy marries, as there is for females.

In recent years, according to several specialists in India, Indian women have aborted uncounted numbers of female fetuses simply because the family wanted a boy. The practice is made easier by the the proliferation of ultrasound machines, which after 14 to 16 weeks of gestation can usually determine the gender of the fetus.

The British-based medical journal The Lancet published a study yesterday quantifying the phenomenon: The report estimated that Indian women aborted a stunning 10 million girls in the two decades leading up to 1998. The study, analyzing data from a national survey of 1.1 million households, calculated that 500,000 female fetuses were aborted each year in India.

You thought the eugenics movement died with the Nazis? Guess again.Heh,one partial solution over the long run is for women from New York city to move to India because there seem to be an imbalance in the female to male ratio.