Killing girls

Fourteen thousand years ago, with the advent of Islam, a proactive effort was made to stop people from killing off female children born into their households. This had been a common practice at the time. But it seems that even today the practice of killing off infant girls, merely on the basis of their gender, continues. In the Pirmahal village of the Toba Tek Singh district in Punjab, police are investigating a horrifying story in which the father of a newborn girl apparently buried her alive, with help from relatives. He first attempted to do so at a local graveyard, but when the gravediggers refused to commit murder, he vanished. The story he is now telling is that a stillborn baby was born to his wife and that the foetus was ‘disposed of’ by hospital staff. The hospital confirms the birth of a living baby girl.
Such stories are not really unusual. They are probably more common than we would like to believe. In 2013, the Edhi Foundation reported the discovery of 591 bodies of infants in Karachi alone. Ninety-nine percent of them were girls. Almost all of the hundreds of children abandoned at the Edhi Foundation each year at the cradles set up by the Edhi Foundation are girls. It is obvious the value for women in our society is low. We do not even know how many female foetuses are disposed of through illegal abortions after the discovery of their gender through ultrasounds. Though radiologists are not permitted to reveal the gender of a baby, they often do so – and for unborn girls this can mean death.
Of course, there has been some change over the years. The enrolment for girls at schools has gone up sharply and perhaps fewer people share the opinions of the suspect in the Toba Tek Singh case who was apparently appalled by the six girls born to his older brother and immediately divorced his first wife after she gave birth to a daughter. But the fact that such events occur make it clear that there is a need to raise more awareness about the equal status of women and their indispensable value in society. In India, villages where mass abortions were carried out some two decades ago have today found that without girls life comes to a virtual end. We must take action against those involved in female infanticide while at the same time empowering women in society and by doing so making it unacceptable that a helpless female child should be so cruelly murdered anywhere in our country.