Gendercide

According to current estimates, Indian men outnumber women by nearly 40 million. That startling gender gap, activists say, is the result of gendercide. Nearly 50,000 female fetuses are aborted every month and untold numbers of baby girls are abandoned or murdered.

"It's the obliteration of a whole class, race, of human beings. It's half the population of India," said women's rights activist Ruchira Gupta of Apne Aap Women Worldwide.

Why is there such deadly discrimination against girls? Part of the answer is money. Girls are a financial burden to their parents, who must pay expensive dowries to marry them off. The dowry is a cultural tradition and the single biggest reason Indians prefer boys.

When an Indian woman gives birth to a baby boy, it is an occasion for jubilation, said women's rights activist Gita Aravamudan, author of the book, "Disappearing Daughters."

A boy's birth is greeted "with great joy because he's going to bring in the moolah," Aravamudan said. "He's going to be the person who gets married to a girl who's bringing in the money."

The reaction can be far different when a baby girl is born, especially when a family has more than one daughter and must face a future of having to pay more than one dowry.
"Amounts of dowry have become higher and higher, and families can get into huge debt bondage just to be able to pay the dowry to get a daughter married," Gupta said.

If a woman's family fails to pay a dowry, she might be beaten, tortured or even burned to death.

"We put very little value to girls and to women," Gupta said. "So they're always in danger from birth to death."

The high rate of female fetus abortions can be traced partly to the proliferation of clinics offering ultrasounds. It is a crime in India to use an ultrasound to determine the sex of a child and it is also illegal to perform an abortion based on gender, but the laws are rarely enforced...

http://abcnews.go.co...ory?id=15103950