Baby happiness
Just become mom.
Happy grandparents.
Oh it was so nice to visit and talk to see the happy faces when we visited Vadu rural hospital outside Pune. I talked to smiling moms, granddads and grandmas. Especially this man was shining of proudness and happiness of his newly born grandchild.
However, what you may not know when you visit or move about in India, is that the child sex ratio has declined sharply in the last two decades. Twenty years ago, there were 945 female children in ages 0-6 for every 1000 male children. Ten years later, that figure dropped to 927 girl children to every 1000 boy children, and in year 2011, this figure has declined to only 914 girls for every 1000 boys. This is to be compared with the figures from the 1901 census, which presented 972 girls to every 1000 boy children. Northern states exhibit a worsening trend, especially during the last decade.
The reasons for this change are three: 1) Female infanticide after the child’s birth 2) Neglect of girl children such as lack of attention, food, nutrition and health care 3) Sex selective abortion
One may think that conditions for and attitudes towards girls and women is slowly on the improve all over the world, but Indian society is becoming more and more discriminating. Also contrary to what one may think, the decline in child sex ration is more sharp in urban than in rural areas.
Families in India prefer to have less and less children, and fertility is declining all over the country. Thus, it gets more and more important that at least one of the children is a son, to support the family economically, who will not leave to move into another family when married, and that will be able to carry out the necessary part of the Hindu ceremony when the parents die. And new technologies such as sonographic machines provide new means to determine the sex of a fetus even before it is born, and is to be found even on the countryside. Indian couples living in other parts of the world come to India to get such a test done. Doctors can be found driving around with portable ultrasound machines in their car offering the “service”.
This type of activities are illegal, and there is an Act prohibiting disclosure of the sex of a fetus under any circumstance. But implementation is poor and crimes difficult to prove as neither the family nor the doctor want to report the committed crime. During my time here in India, it has been reported by newspapers that some NGOs have carried out decoy operations. They have let pregnant women visit clinics offering sonography and the women have pretended to want to pay for a sex determination test to know if it is a boy or a girl. This is done to produce evidence and to send some of these doctors into jail. (This kind of evidence provocation and aimed actions at selected doctors is startling to me, but what I understood from the newspapers it is encouraged by the government, who is unable to spend the necessary resources on the implementation of the law!).
India 