There’s got to be a joke in that title somewhere, but until one suggests itself, we’ll stick with tragedy:
Narinder is one of four sons and only one of his brothers has managed to get married. In his district in the state of Uttar Pradesh, there are only 858 girls born for every 1,000 boys, a ratio that doesn’t occur naturally without medical intervention. The northwestern state of Uttar Pradesh is home to one of the largest skewed sex ratios in India.
“Only the rich and men with government jobs manage to get a bride these days,” he says. “Anyone who earns less cannot find a bride here anymore.”
To be fair, the job doesn’t have a lot to recommend it:
A new bride would help his parents, he says. “They would have had an easier life. They would have had someone to cook and to take care of them.”
She should clean. She should run the household. She should bear children. And Narinder plans to share her with his two unmarried brothers, who live in the same house.
Where do I sign?
On the one hand, they’re snuffing around 15% of unborn girls; on the other, the girls who are permitted to be born grow up to marry rich men, rather than shmoes like Narinder, and his brothers, and his parents, and his children. That’s a decent trade.
Isn’t it?
Decades of sex-selective abortion have created an acute lack of women in certain parts of India. Traffickers capitalize on the shortage by recruiting or kidnapping women ensnared in poverty to sell as brides. It’s a cycle influenced by poverty and medical technologies, but one that ultimately is perpetuated by India’s attitude towards women.
…
The National Crime Records Bureau estimated in 2012 that about 10 women are kidnapped in Assam every day. Some of these women are found again. Some go missing forever.
Eastern Indian states like Assam, Jharkhand, West Bengal and Odisha turn into source areas for bride trafficking, because they have much more balanced sex ratios. Meanwhile, India’s northwestern states are more conservative and also more affluent, meaning they’re able to afford ultrasound scans and selective abortions.
So, abortion in India effects girl babies overwhelmingly, and leads to such an imbalance between the sexes that teenage girls are routinely kidnapped from their homes and sold as child brides.
Hello? Betty Friedan? Gloria Steinem?
I went to NOW’s website and looked up India. I confess I expected nothing, but I was wrong.
There was one entry on this topic:
Jim Yardley reports for The New York Times: “India’s increasing wealth and improving literacy are apparently contributing to a national crisis of ‘missing girls,’ with the number of sex-selective abortions up sharply among more affluent, educated families during the past two decades, according to a new study.”
Read the original source
That was more than three years ago, and that was it. No comment, no discussion, no nothing. In the meantime, 11,980 girls have been abducted in Assam alone (if the rate is accurate and consistent). I don’t think I can count how many girls were terminated before birth.
To repeat for the thousandth time, I don’t oppose abortion. Though less and less can I morally justify even my limited pro-choice position. Abortion leads to massive abuse against women in India (China’s little better, if not worse) and genocide among African Americans. In a sane world (a fanciful construct if there ever was one), feminists would oppose abortion with every fibroid of their being. Organizations like NOW and Planned Parenthood would be exposed as the brainwashers that they really are.
“Women’s reproductive health”? That’s a locution worthy of Stalin, Mao, or Goebbels. I guess that’s the joke.
