The War Against Women

Saturday, January 14, 2006

The War Against Women

Begins in the Womb-Cry Genocide

A study on female foeticide in India that has been published by renowned British medical journal, Lancet, states that since 1994, over 1 crore - 10 million - female foetuses have been aborted in the country.

India's 'girl deficit' deepest among educated

In 1994, India banned the use of technology to determine the sex of unborn children and the termination of pregnancies on the basis of gender.
However, research for the year 2001 showed that for every 1,000 male babies born in India, there were just 933 girls.
Leading campaigners say many of India's fertility clinics continue to offer a seemingly legitimate facade for a multi-billion pound racket and that gender determination is still big business in India.
The researchers said the "girl deficit" was more common among educated women but did not vary according to religion.
Experts in India say female foeticide is mostly linked to socio-economic factors.
It is an idea that many say carries over from the time India was a predominantly agrarian society where boys were considered an extra pair of hands on the farm.
The girl child has traditionally been considered inferior and a liability - a bride's dowry can cripple a poor family financially

India 'lost birth' study disputed BBC News

I have not seen a lot of bloggers covering this story. It appeared in the MSM one day and of course was gone the next, moving on to the next big story. The Lancet study was done by Doctors at the University of Toronto

DOI:10.1016/S0140-6736(06)67930-0

Low male-to-female sex ratio of children born in India: national survey of 1·1 million households
Prabhat Jha a , Rajesh Kumar b, Priya Vasa a, Neeraj Dhingra a, Deva Thiruchelvam aRahim Moineddin a and
Summary
Background
Fewer girls than boys are born in India. Various hypotheses have been proposed to explain this low sex ratio. Our aim was to ascertain the contribution of prenatal sex determination and selective abortion as measured by previous birth sex.
Methods
We analysed data obtained for the Special Fertility and Mortality Survey undertaken in 1998. Ever-married women living in 1·1 million households in 6671 nationally-representative units were asked questions about their fertility history and children born in 1997.
Findings
For the 133 738 births studied for 1997, the adjusted sex ratio for the second birth when the preceding child was a girl was 759 per 1000 males (99% CI 731–787). The adjusted sex ratio for the third child was 719 (675–762) if the previous two children were girls. By contrast, adjusted sex ratios for second or third births if the previous children were boys were about equal (1102 and 1176, respectively). Mothers with grade 10 or higher education had a significantly lower adjusted sex ratio (683, 610–756) than did illiterate mothers (869, 820–917). Stillbirths and neonatal deaths were more commonly male, and the numbers of stillbirths were fewer than the numbers of missing births, suggesting that female infanticide does not account for the difference.
Interpretation
Prenatal sex determination followed by selective abortion of female fetuses is the most plausible explanation for the low sex ratio at birth in India. Women most clearly at risk are those who already have one or two female children. Based on conservative assumptions, the practice accounts for about 0·5 million missing female births yearly, translating over the past 2 decades into the abortion of some 10 million female fetuses.
Affiliations

a Centre for Global Health Research, St Michael's Hospital, and Department of Public Health Sciences, Faculty of Medicine, University of Toronto, Toronto, Canada
b School of Public Health, Post Graduate Institute of Medical Education and Research, Chandigarh, India
Correspondence to: Dr Prabhat Jha, Centre for Global Health Research, St Michael's Hospital, University of Toronto, 70 Richmond Street East, 2nd Floor, Toronto, Ontario M5C 1N8, Canada

The study proves Canadian born feminist theoritician Shulamith Firestone correct.

In her seminal work the Dialectic of Sex she said that as patriarchical society advances its bio-technology in medicine and reproduction (reproductive technology), women become more and more expendable. Girls are commodities in patriarchical society, ones that are valued or disposed of.

Now those on the right will immediately blame the access to abortion that women now have thanks to medical advances. And they will blame feminism;

'Gender' - a new dangerous ideology
Sunday - Catholic Weekly, Poland - 14 Dec 2005
... Shulamith Firestone in her book 'The Dialectic of Sex', published in 1970, modifying the idea of the class struggles, calls to sex-class revolution: 'In order ...

But the reality is that it is patriarchical society which values males as property owners, and devalues women and childern as property, that is the source of this war against women. A war conducted in the wombs of mothers. Not due to advances in abortion, those are ancient womens knoweldge since the dawn of time, but from the advances in the technology of the Ultrasound.

Now those who would use this information to condemn access to abortion would sound ridiculous if they demanded the end of the use of the ultrasound. So vital in the industrial world to the happiness of the middle class who get to see their children growing in moms womb. But in the newly industrialized world, with its cash value for males, this same middle class and upper class use the ultrasound for selective breeding. Abortion comes after.

This war is not isolated to India. It is a world wide phenomena. It is the reality of patriarchal 'family values'.

China faces future as land of boys 09/03/05

Editorial: Asia's Male Tilt 07/15/04

FEMALE FOETICIDE

Indians have terminated 10 million girl babies in the last 20 years. This shocking reality has been uncovered in a study done by medical journal Lancet, which also reveals that female foeticide is not a phenomenon restricted to rural India. The fact is corroborated by the 2001 census — 933 girls per 1000 boys. CNN-IBN uncovers India's age-old fascination with the boy child, which has skewed the census figures so.