According to a story in the Monitor, as many as 500,000 female fetuses are being aborted in India each year because they are female. The numbers are so high because ultrasound technology has reached doctor’s offices in every part of India. Where one might, perhaps stereotypically, expect to find incidents of gender killing of fetuses to occur amongst the poor and “backward”, it is actually most prevalent among India’s educated classes who can afford multiple utrasounds and trips to the doctor.

I’m genuinely perplexed as to what the feminist answer to this is. Do we stand by the abortion rights as an absolute, even if that means a sort of genocide is perpetuated against female fetuses?

This entry was posted on Friday, January 13th, 2006 at 12:12 pm and is filed under Big "P" Politics, International Affairs. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.