The Ultrasound Generation — Ten Million Missing Baby Girls in India

Just how will the feminists respond to this? The Times [London] now reports that the use of ultrasound imaging technology has led to the abortion of approximately 500,000 girl babies each year — that’s more than 10 million over the past twenty years.

From the article:

Gender determination is big business. Male offspring are typically regarded as a blessing — future breadwinners who will look after parents in old age — but many parents still see girls as a financial burden, and the consequences are chilling.

According to a study published yesterday in The Lancet, more than ten million female fetuses may have been aborted in India in the past twenty years after gender checks.

Shirish Sheth, of the Breach Candy hospital in Bombay, a co-author of the Lancet report, said: “To have a daughter is socially and emotionally accepted if there is a son, but a daughter’s arrival is often unwelcome if the couple already have a daughter.

“Daughters are regarded as a liability. Because she will eventually belong to the family of her future husband, expenditure on her will benefit others. In some communities where the custom of dowry prevails, the cost of her dowry could be phenomenal.”

She added: “We conservatively estimate that prenatal sex determination and selective abortion accounts for 500,000 missing girls yearly. If this practice has been common for most of the past two decades since access to ultrasound became widespread, then a figure of ten million missing female births would not be unreasonable.”

SEE ALSO: My commentaries, “Asia’s Surplus Sons and Missing Daughters,” published May 7, 2004; and “The Brave New World of Sex-Selection Technologies,” published February 7, 2004.