Little One,

How do I talk to you? Explain to you, you who are dead even before you were born. Erased from existence. Wiped out from memory. Torn from the safest place God made – a mother’s womb. Destroyed by the very same people who created you.

Your crime? You were a female foetus.

In a game where the dice was already loaded against you, your very existence posed a threat to your mother’s "status" in society, questioned your father’s virility and put an end to your family’s lineage. If you’d grown up, you would have cost money – money spent on your upbringing and education and more money spent when it was time to get you married. So they put an end to it.

Remember the advertisements scrawled across tenement walls and subway halts, the one that sears its way into the hearts and minds of families – "SPEND RS.500 TODAY AND SAVE RS. 50,000 TOMORROW". That’s all that it cost to cut your life short – Rs. 500. And it was as simple as that – a visit to the doctor, a few tests to confirm your sex and you’re deleted – consigned to the dustbin. RIP.

But you’re not alone, not the sole victim, not the only one to be singled out. In a patrilinear society like ours where the male child is prized and valued beyond imagination, many a female foetus suffers the same fate as you did. Let me tell you about it.

In a city like Bombay, there are over 500 clinics and labs that annually conduct over 16,000 ‘genetic’ tests, ultrasounds, sex determination tests like amniocentesis, chorionic villi biopsies and other pre-natal diagnostic tests to find out the sex of the unborn child. Once the sex is confirmed to be female, the foetus is simply aborted; no matter, the risk to the mother. She too, is expendable.

Want some facts? In the period between 1983 –86 alone, more than 78,000 female foetuses were aborted in Bombay. 450 women were informed the sex of their unborn child was female; 430 (95.5%) of them went ahead and terminated their pregnancies. 250 women were informed of genetic disorders in their male foetuses; all 250 (100%) went ahead with their pregnancies.

Don’t think we didn’t try to stop them, didn’t try to save you. Women’s Groups, Human Rights Groups, Legal Action Groups and concerned individuals protested against this blatant abuse of medical science. Their concerted action and campaigns to raise public awareness and educate public opinion set in motion a debate in the print media that eventually forced the government to enact the Maharashtra Regulation of Use of Prenatal Diagnostic Tests Act in 1988, making illegal the use of medical techniques and technology to determine the sex of foetuses. But like every law, this one too, had lacunae that provided medical practitioners with loopholes to continue as before. The Indian Medical Association threatened to revoke the licenses of those members who conducted sex determination tests that facilitated female foeticide. But like I told you, there’s always a way around. So the status remained at quo.

Defendants of Sex Determination Tests try to tell us that they are an aid to "balanced families", a way to reduce birth rates and control the population explosion. No matter, that these ‘gains’ are made at the cost of only female lives. They say sex determination tests give women "a choice" – a reproductive choice, in the same way as they choose birth control. No matter, then if the "choice" is made under social and familial pressures; at the cost of the woman’s physical well being and mental health. So what if personal interest came second to the desires of the men. They forgot that "choice" is meaningful only if it is exercised in the context of material, social and gender equality.

Some of us worry about the demographic repercussions of female foeticide. At the beginning of the last century, for every 1000 men, there were 972 women. By the end of the century, figures had fallen to 868 women per 1000 men and today there are half a million more men than women. Apologists for the system assure us that the adverse sex ratio actually favours women. When the demand exceeds supply, the value of the scarce item increases. No matter then, that it reduces women to a saleable commodity.

Still others remind us of the terrible practice of female infanticide, wherein little baby girls were smothered to death, poisoned or buried alive. Surely, they ask, it is better to abort an unborn child than to kill a newborn? They remind us of the ill treatment meted out to the girl child and ask if she were born to suffer this? They remind us of dowry deaths and ask if it were not better to die unborn than to be burnt alive?

We celebrate the decade of the girl child, the year of the girl child; we promote the girl child but to no avail. We live in a chauvinistic world - one in which women allow others to decide for them, where women don’t stand up and speak out. A world in which women perpetuate the myth of negative social worth of women/girls, where women continue to be their own worst enemies. And so long as we live in such a world, female foetuses will continue to die unborn and unmourned.

And that, my friend, is the bottom line.

Do you now think you are better off dead than alive? Not that, little one, the choice was ever yours to make.

With regrets,

A sister who survived.