Sex selection, a gender discrimination of the worst kind, is highly prevalent across all strata of Indian society. Physicians have a crucial role in this practice and implementation of the Indian Government's Pre-Natal Diagnostic Techniques Act in 1996 to prevent the misuse of ultrasound techniques for the purpose of prenatal sex determination. Little is known about family preferences, let alone preferences among families of physicians. We investigated the sex ratios in 946 nuclear families with 1,624 children, for which either one or both parents were physicians. The overall child sex ratio was more skewed than the national average of 914. The conditional sex ratios decreased with increasing number of previous female births, and a previous birth of a daughter in the family was associated with a 38 % reduced likelihood of a subsequent female birth. The heavily skewed sex ratios in the families of physicians are indicative of a deeply rooted social malady that could pose a critical challenge in correcting the sex ratios in India.
I'd like to relate this to our present fight for fetal rights in the Western World.
If we are ever to hope to establish fetal rights, we must convince the medical profession of their existence.
Not just abortionists, but the medical profession.
If students go through med school with the idea that abortion is legitimate, if hospitals treat it as such, if medical writers treat it as such, it will go unchallenged.
Doctors use their authority to quash fetal rights. They maintain that abortion is medically necessary, and since they're the experts, no one can question them.
If and if they're "medically necessary" the health system will keep doing them.
Source:
Demography. 2013 Jan 16. [Epub ahead of print]
Skewed Sex Ratios in India: "Physician, Heal Thyself"
Patel AB, Badhoniya N, Mamtani M, Kulkarni H.
Lata Medical Research Foundation, Nagpur, India.
