Female genital mutilation in Asia

Farida Ahmed

Female infanticide is still prevalent in some Asian countries such as India, Pakistan and China.

Statistics show abortion of millions of fetuses after they are found to be female. Selective abortion threatens the demographic composition of the population because of the large disparity between male and female numbers, although governments enact legislation and laws that criminalize the practice.

For decades, females have been killed in these countries after they went to life, but with the development of science and the emergence of ultrasound devices for the early detection of the fetus, deliberate killing has occurred at an early stage, unremarkably as mass abortions in modern ways.

The crime is part of a series of crimes against women, where women suffer from the most discriminatory rates of violence, such as rape, murder and beatings, until they are female.

The number of women in India has decreased by 63 million because of male preference for females and selective abortion, and 21 million girls are unwanted because fathers prefer to have boys, according to the Ministry of Finance.

An Indian colwant fell victim to the habit, forcing her husband and her family to abort three times because the fetuses were "female."

In 1961, there were 976 girls for every 1,000 boys under the age of seven, but today the number dropped to 914 in 2011.

The selective killing of embryos in India has led to a "gender gap" that seriously threatens the demographics.

In 1990 there were 25 million more males than females in India, prompting the government in 1994 to introduce a law banning ultrasound testing to determine the fetus's prenatal sex, but there are more than 40,000 registered ultrasound clinics, Registered.

Because of male preference for females, girls were twins after birth, but ultrasound technology helped to make the disease happen early.

In a study in The Lancet in 2011, female pregnancies ranged between 4 and 12 million cases between 1980 and 2010.

Most of these cases represent the second pregnancy of mothers after having a baby in their first pregnancy, according to the British newspaper The Telegraph.

Male preference for females is mainly for economic reasons, where men in India are considered the source of income of the first family and because they also receive a higher salary than the female for the same work.

And the phenomenon of paying the family of a girl foals to a man at marriage makes many Indian families prefer males for dowry, and get rid of girls as a financial burden at marriage cost them a lot, in addition to the cultural reasons that believe in the male "holder" of the family title, And become dependent on the husband's family.

Women's inferiority in India made it the most dangerous country for women, according to Thomson Reuters, where crimes against women rose 83 percent between 2007 and 2016 when four rapes were reported every hour.

The United Nations noted that violence against women in India is spreading at the family and sexual level and harassment within the family and in public places and workplaces.

Many women live with their families under established patriarchal rules and cultural practices associated with male superiority and female inferiority.

In the garbage
The inferiority of women is not limited to India, but it is common in Pakistan, making female murder commonplace.

She was not surprised when she woke up the second day after she was a female, to find her disappeared on her part, to tell her husband "I cared about her."

"When I was pregnant, my husband asked me to pray that the fetus was not a female, and when I gave birth I was expecting her fate," said the grieving mother.

Zaytoun said she saw three other children dead in the same area. "Zaitoun" saw an ambulance crew pick up a small body from a garbage dump outside her apartment building in Haryana in a random cotton settlement where some of the poorest families live in Karachi.

Pakistani authorities have found 345 dead children, 99 percent of them female, in waste piles in Karachi, the most populous city since the beginning of 2017, the Daily Mail reported.

A Pakistani human rights group said 1,100 women were killed in honor killings last year. According to the Independent Human Rights Commission, another 90 women were sexually abused and about 800 were suicide bombers or suicide bombers, according to the BBC.

One child
Although women in China are not exposed to similarities in South Asia, the culture of female fetal killing is not a new event in society. The one-child policy pursued by the communist state for more than 30 years has contributed to the incursion .

This policy, which ended in 2015, contributed to the selective abortion of fetuses. Under this policy, the wages of parents with more than one child may be reduced and they are deprived of some social services, which has made many parents prefer to have children because of Asian culture. "Male" guarantee for the continuation of the family and as a "bond" for his parents in old age.

Despite the government's adoption of the Mother Health Care Act, which prohibits the use of ultrasound to detect fetal sex so as not to determine the fate of female infants in advance or to promote selective abortion, this has not stopped the crime, as many parents still do not want to bear the expenses of education Two children, so they get rid of the female embryos until they get born.