An unwelcome obligation
Female people are not valued in India.
Laali’s unborn daughter is among India’s estimated 46 million “missing females” over a period of 50 years, ten times the female population of London. A deepening gender bias, breeding rampant sex-selective abortions and female infanticides, means that India accounts for nearly half of global missing female births.
“The traditional pattern of marriage and customs dictate an inferior position to women in Indian societies,” says Prem Chowdhry, a gender activist and retired professor at the University of Delhi. Since girls leave their birth family after marriage, she says, the dowry and cost of raising a girl is considered an unwelcome obligation, and sex-selective abortions are common.
Not a problem. Just abort the female ones and let the male ones proceed. There will be no more female people and everything will be perfect.
Laali was 19 when her marriage was arranged with a farmer in 2009. In the next three years, she gave birth to two daughters. During her second pregnancy, she was regularly drugged by traditional and faith healers in order to “make” a boy.
When her baby girl was born, no one from her family came to see them in the hospital. Returning home was worse. “My mother-in-law refused to see my daughter’s face,” Laali said. “She refused to take care of me, saying: ‘you are giving birth to girl after girl. How far can I take care of you?’”
Every night, as she sat down for dinner after a day of labour in the field, someone would toss in a taunt. “When anyone had a son in the village, it was a nightmare for me,” she recalls. “My family abused me in front of my girls.”
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For Laali, harassment is part of her daily life. By the time she was 15, her mother had aborted two female foetuses, and her younger sister has aborted at least three.
“You are brought up in an environment where this violence against women is completely acceptable and normalised,” says George. “The question is: how do you resist this on the ground? And that’s frightening.”
Without women there aren’t any babies, female or male. You’d think that would make females valuable to people who want babies, but nope.
It also raises the male:female ratio across the society, creating further difficulties: some men will never find women to court and marry, arguably increasing the frequency of de facto polyandry. Also arguably the frequency of rape.
This sort of thing is exactly why I rail against the current push to “trust other ways of knowing”. We know what “makes” a boy, and it ain’t drugs.
Just say the fetus identifies as a boy and there you go, right?
What a sorry state we’re in :-/
Omar, yes – there have been reports on rising violence because of the missing women.
OB: And yet….
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/dec/23/australia-has-been-forced-to-face-the-truth-about-the-gender-based-violence-behind-its-safe-and-happy-facade
Omar, we have known about this since Jesus Christ played Full Forward for Jerusalem. The problem isn’t that we are/were unaware, the problem is the modelling from the top.
Brittany Higgins claims she was raped in an MP’s office. She was found naked by a security guard and the government’s first response was to deep clean a potential crime scene. When Brittany went public, a report was prepared for the PM, but he never found the time to read it.
Feeling backlash, the PM implemented and training regime, but it was only for an hour, voluntary attendance, and the majority of his male MPs volunteered to stay away.
Our previous PM invoked a ‘no bonking” policy after his deputy, still a married man, impreganted one of his staffers and moved in with her. Many of his MP’s derided him.
Our current Minister for Health has “moved out” of the family home. We are unsure if this is to do with simply an affair, or if he, too, has impregnated his young paramour.
Too many in our current government have come from wealth, privilege, and entitlement and are eager to emulate Trump’s pussy grabbing.
We have an election due sometime between now and September (yep, one of the oddities) and a number of strong, motivated, and angry women are standing as independent candidates against some of the worst men in our Parliament. They may or may not win, but they have already had a major victory with the government running scared. No longer are the “doctor’s wives” just voting against them, they are now standing for election.
As a 69-year-old rusted on socialist, I always vote Labor, but were one of these women in my electorate, I would be compelled to give her my first preference (don’t ask, another of our vagaries).
Roj: Careful, now; careful. You are talking about Bonking Barnaby Joyce, our esteemed Deputy PM. A bit of respect is in order. Also, PM Scummo Morrison was no doubt too busy practicing his hymn-singing for the following Sunday at his local Hill$$$ong Church, when he has to show full-on enthusiasm, particularly if there are TV crews present. So that excuses him from reading it, and should be a good enough explanation for the likes of you: a self-confessed 69 year-old socialist rusty as an old IXL jam tin.
I suggest you write Barnaby a humble apology, in case he should turn nasty. Remember, he’s got form. Between bonks, he might find time to look at it.
Nah, he’s too tied up with Amber Heard naming her new dog after him. :-)
Scummo has gone MIA again, but noted that there was also a lack of Jen in his last few “daggy dad” appearances. Tha man sure knows how to cook a curry.
Sorry, OB, but I didn’t realise Omar was one of us.
Back on topic.
Why aren’t the TRA’s rushing to India to teach girls how to “identify as males” and save lives? Because violence against Indian girls is just so not like being misgendered in a restaurant.
Those selfish genes are selecting against peasants too maliciously stupid to not kill their girl babies.
Systematic femicide has devastating consequences. The proliferation of disconnected men creates a fertile field for social and political pathology.
China’s ‘bare branch’ rebellion, around the same time as Tai Ping, was supposed to have been triggered by the Shoah of baby girls during a famine/depression a generation before.