13.5 million baby girls have been killed by sex-selective abortions in India between 1987 and 2016, a leading medical journal has estimated. Michael Robinson, SPUC Director of Communications, said: “Abortion is so often promoted falsely as a ‘woman’s right’. But we can clearly see how it violently targets, weeds out and kills members of the female population.”
The research paper, published in The Lancet, stated: “Half of the world’s missing female births occur in India, due to sex-selective abortion… We found that 13.5 million female births were missing during the three decades of observation (1987–2016).”
India outlawed sex-selective abortion in 1994; however, the practice of killing unborn females, who may be viewed as a financial or cultural burden is still common practice.
Consequently, India has experienced severely skewed sex ratios since the 1970s. According to recent reports, India’s cultural preference for males has led to a surge of discriminatory practices, such as the deliberate targeting of girls for abortion, as well as the provision of better nutrition, medical care and education for males.
The preference for sons
In 2019, SPUC reported on the escalation of female foeticide occurring in India, when a report from the Population Research Institute (PRI) found that 15.8 million girls had been killed in the womb through sex-selective abortions in India since 1990.
The PRI report stated that:
“Due to a strong, culturally-rooted preference for sons in many parts of the world, millions of girls have been selectively aborted merely because their parents had wanted a boy instead. Since the introduction of ultrasound technology made it easy and affordable for parents to find out the sex of their child prior to birth, the practice of sex-selective abortion became widespread. Most of these selective terminations have occurred either in China or India.”
It is now expected that there will be 6.8 million fewer female births in India between 2017-2030.
Sex-selective terminations in the UK
Evidence of sex-selective abortions occurring in the UK has come to light in recent years.
In 2018, Labour MP Naz Shah warned that early blood tests were being used across the UK within ethnic minority communities who had a “cultural preference for boys”, hence seeking to abort females.
Similarly, the Nuffield Council on Bioethics warned that increasingly widespread Non-Invasive Pre-natal Testing (NIPT), involving early blood tests, could turn the UK into a haven for sex-selective abortions.
SPUC’s Michael Robinson said: “Abortion is being used as a sexist tool to weed out and kill the female population. This is the most blatant and obscene discrimination.
“It is vital that we make efforts to promote the value and equality of women and girls to combat this assault on their very existence.
“The targeted killing of the unborn, often based on gender identity, is discriminatory. It is high time that we wake up to the gendercide silently taking place in our world.”