The INFO Project Blog

I saw just the recent BBC article called UK Indian women ‘aborting girls,’ documenting the current realities of systematic, sex-selective abortion among groups of British women of Indian descent. This form of “gendercide” has also been called female infanticide/foeticide, and it is thought to account for 1,500 “missing girls” from the total number of births expected in the UK from 1990-2005.

The BBC interviewed one woman who admitted to aborting her baby girl for reasons of gender, who said,

Unfortunately it was another girl. My husband and I thought the burden would probably be too much and the pressure when I got back home. So we decided to terminate.

It seems really interesting to me that such traditional cultural expectations regarding giving birth to males are still so acutely affecting women, even in “progressive” countries like Britain–and are in fact, affecting male: female birth ratios at such a significant level in the UK today. What does this mean for baby girls in the years to come? What, other than laws with obvious loopholes, can be done to protect these girls who have no voice?

You can read the BBC article or listen to BBC’s interview with one woman by clicking here.