Mothers of India Cry for Joy to Learn It’s a Boy

The sign stands outside a doctor’s office in a leafy New Delhi neighborhood, a hand-painted warning that the law is upheld in this enclave of walled-off homes, imported cars and private clubs.

“Here prenatal sex determination [boy or girl before birth] is not done. It is a punishable act,” the sign says in both English and Hindi.

The law, though, clearly has its loopholes.

“The Indian mentality is like this: You have to have a son,” said one New Delhi woman from a wealthy industrial family.

After she gave birth to a daughter, her husband’s family demanded that she have illegal sex-determination tests. When each of her next three pregnancies tested female, they demanded that she have abortions. In a nation where a woman’s in-laws often wield enormous influence, she complied.

“They say I have to try and try” for a son, said the woman, who spoke on condition that she not be identified. “My mother-in-law -- full pressure; my father-in-law -- full pressure.”

Across much of India, sons have long been preferred. They have more status, they don’t require expensive wedding dowries, they can light their parents’ funeral pyres. A married woman traditionally moves in with her husband’s family.

“Raising a girl,” an Indian adage says, “is like watering the neighbor’s garden.”

The preference for sons has led to such practices as killing female infants -- illegal for well over a century but still practiced in some parts of this nation of 1.05 billion people. And with the advent of sex-determination tests has come the aborting of female fetuses.

Activists and officials long believed that such practices were largely an issue among the poor and less educated, and would gradually be choked off by education, legislation and the spread of India’s middle class.

But as that educated middle class has blossomed over the last two decades, and laws protecting girls have been strengthened, the numbers have grown worse.

And among the worst of all areas are those wealthy enclaves.

“We thought we’d create awareness through education,” said Dr. Sharda Jain, a gynecologist with a well-heeled New Delhi clientele and a fierce opposition to sex-determination tests. “But what happens when the educated want to terminate their girl children?”

Six years ago, faced with the spread of inexpensive ultrasound technology and a parallel slide in the girl-boy ratio, India outlawed prenatal sex-determination tests.

At best, the effect has been minimal. In the 2001 census’ count of children 6 or under, there were 927 girls for every 1,000 boys-- down from 945 girls in 1991 and 962 in 1981.

The statistics mean there are anywhere from 20 million to 40 million “missing” women in India -- the result of girls aborted or killed in infancy, according to census reports and activists.

The preference for boys, strong across most of Asia, has also led to a scarcity of women elsewhere, particularly in China, where the official one-child policy has dramatically magnified the pressure for male children and spawned trafficking in kidnapped women for brides.

In India’s larger families, if the first-born is a daughter, she will normally be accepted. But the pressure for boys can build fiercely after that.

India’s 2001 census found the widening of the sex ratio was sharpest in India’s most economically developed states. In New Delhi, the capital, the ratio dropped from 945 girls per 1,000 boys in 1991 to 865 last year.

Near the bottom were some of the city’s toniest neighborhoods.

“There has been a belief that urbanization and prosperity will somehow have a modernizing effect,” said Satish Agnihotri, a Calcutta University professor who studies the demographics of what he and others call “feticide.” The reality, though, is the opposite: “As prosperity goes up, the sex ratio seems to go down.”

It is another example of the dichotomy that is modern India. Fifty-five years after independence from Britain, India has the world’s largest middle class, estimated at 300 million people -- but nearly 250 million malnourished people.

It is a country with one of the world’s leading software centers, the city of Bangalore -- but where 110 million homes have no toilets. It is a nation that decades ago elected a female prime minister, Indira Gandhi -- and where some women hold top posts in academia, business and government -- but where most women are still relegated to lives of quiet household desperation.

The reasons for the dismal gender statistics range from the economic to the cultural: pressure for small families, dowry demands that can run into thousands of dollars and, perhaps most important, a steep drop in the cost of ultrasound tests. Unlike prenatal amniocentesis exams, which can cost hundreds of dollars, a sex-determination ultrasound can cost less than $10, an abortion just $18.

That’s a lot for India’s poor, although still manageable for most. For the wealthy, it’s less than a good restaurant dinner.

Activists say the issue is not abortion, which is widely accepted in India, but how women are valued. That’s something that many women struggle with themselves.

A well-off woman in her late 20s, a college graduate in the social sciences, described growing increasingly depressed during her second pregnancy. Already the mother of a daughter, she desperately wanted a son.

“It was just my own pressure that I was missing something in my life,” said the woman who, torn by her feelings, didn’t seek an illegal ultrasound. “I was in a big trauma because even if it is a girl, then what am I going to do?”

Her gynecologist, worried that the woman’s fear would affect her health, finally told her that she was carrying a boy.

“It made me cry so much,” the woman said, relief and pride echoing in her voice. “My life got fulfilled.”

Some activists, though, say the problem is as much legal as cultural. They blast the government for barely enforcing the 6-year-old law -- the Supreme Court had to order enforcement in 2001, and then in response to lawsuits. There have apparently been few prosecutions of doctors or ultrasound technicians.

“We have people talking about it now, but that is not enough,” said Sabu George, a co-petitioner in the Supreme Court lawsuit. “In many parts of the country, there is no implementation” of the law.

George puts much of the blame on the medical profession, saying greed drives the availability of illegal services.

Doctors say that’s nonsense.

While the staff in Jain’s clinic regularly perform ultrasounds and abortions, they don’t do sex-determination tests -- or abortions if they believe that the woman had a sex test elsewhere.

But for many doctors, that refusal is a struggle. Many have long relationships with their patients and know that if they won’t break the law, other doctors will.

“It’s not just one woman, it’s hundreds” who ask for the tests, said a New Delhi gynecologist who refuses to perform sex-determinations, but knows that many of her patients get them elsewhere. “We are close to them. That is why we don’t give them to the police.”

Over the years, plans to battle the gender deficit have included threats of jail time for lawbreaking doctors, preachy movies and condemnations by religious leaders. New rules say clinics performing ultrasounds must post signs warning that they don’t do sex tests, although few appear to comply.

Little has worked.

Surprisingly, many activists still believe that the answer lies in education and economics -- and that a shift is coming.

“Things will definitely change,” said Jain, who believes that as more educated women become financially independent, their value and decision-making power will increase.

For some, the change has already come.

The woman pressured by her in-laws into repeated abortions is pregnant again. Now, though, her resolve has strengthened.

“Whether it’s a boy or girl I don’t care,” she said. “I want a baby .... I want a second child whatever it is.”

This time she’s had no sex test. And she insists that she won’t.