With no conviction, foeticide continues  

Sex-selective abortions are banned under law, but 24-year-old Asha was told the gender of her unborn child at a state government-run hospital for Rs 50. “The nurse who assisted the doctor doing my ultrasound at Care Hospital in Mysore offered to tell me the gender of the baby for Rs 50. She said later she had charged less because it was a girl,” says Asha. Luckily for the unborn child, Asha wanted a girl child so did not get the baby aborted. As it happened, the nurse was wrong. “I had a son and now villagers are wary of what these greedy doctors tell them,” she says.

Sex-selective foeticide in common in Kar-nataka, but those breaking the law are impossible to catch, says state health minister R. Ashok. “We have had no convictions in Karnataka because we have not been able to get evidence that would hold up in court. The crime is committed behind closed doors and no one complains -neither the patient or their families, nor the doctor. We have to get clinching evidence, because the erring doctors are often the pillars of society,” says Ashok. The minister has obviously been misinformed. Under the Pre-natal Diagnostic Techniques (PNDT) Act, you do not need to act on a complaint. “The government can examine the records of ultrasound clinics and use the information to frame charges,” says Donna Fernandes, who heads Vimochana, a Bangalore-based NGO that works on women issues such as battering, dowry and foeticide.  With the help of decoy patients, her group identified two doctors who agreed to do sex-determination for Rs 5,000. “The case fell through in the district court, which ruled that since the patient - the decoy in the case- was not pregnant, sex-selection could not have been done,” says Fernandes.

Foeticide, they all say, is linked with the practice of dowry “Everyone wants sex-selection because no one want to spend thousands on dowry when the girl grows up,” says S. H. Balram, women and child development project officer, Mandya district, where the villages of Avveraholli and Marumgere have sex ratios of 518 and 512 girls/1,000 boys respectively.

The only way to stop foeticide is to implement the PNDT Act. "It worked for sati and child marriage. How can the doctors breaking the law like criminals be called pillars of society. If they commit a crime, they should be convicted like criminals," says Fernandes.