A doctor has been arrested in India after allegedly performing 900 sex-selective abortions on girls.
Dr Chandan Ballal is said to have aborted 20 girls every month over three years. Other staff, including the manager of the hospital where the abortions took place, were also arrested.
Indian authorities believe that one motivation was money, with commissions being granted to one individual for identifying couples disappointed by the sex of their unborn child, and each abortion cost around 30,000 Indian rupees each.
While sex-selective abortion is illegal in India, the practice is common, and there is still a strong preference for boys in many Asian countries.
Since the proliferation of sex determination tests in India in the 1970s, the country is believed to have 63 million fewer women because of abortion, while 13.5 million girls are estimated to have been aborted there between 1987 and 2016. In 2020, a study warned that female foeticide in India could lead to 6.8 million fewer girls being born by 2030, further skewing the male-to-female ratio.
India and China, both of which have a cultural preference for boys, account for more than 90% of worldwide missing female births, according to the UN Population Fund.
SPUC comment
A SPUC spokesperson said: “Unborn girls are the number one target of abortion around the world, especially in India and China, while mothers also come under huge pressure to abort babies labelled ‘undesirable’ by society.
“At a time when human beings are increasingly treated like commodities, unborn babies considered to be faulty in some way, or just unwanted, are coming under even greater threat from abortion.
“While this horrific story might seem far away, the same abortion ethic that led to the killing of 900 babies in India is also at work in the UK, where the right to life has similarly been denied to the unborn, innocent lives that are singled out for destruction ever more fervently by the abortion industry.”
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