What Is «gendercide» and How Can It Be Overcome?
Unnatural selection
Raising a daughter is like watering your neighbors garden
Chinese Proverb
Meathu Churana is the first woman, the inhabitant of India who sued her own husband for trying to kill theirs unborn daughters. Meathu lives and works as a doctor in Delhi. We can just sympathize with her story: the husband and his family wanted the successor, but the ultrasonic results revealed that twin-girls will be born, though the laws of India forbid finding out a sex of a child during the pregnancy. The woman was forced to make an abortion, was locked in a room, they didn’t feed her, the husband throwed her downstairs to provoke an abortion. But despite of everything Meathu run away to her parents and gave a birth to healthy girls.
After two years she began a legal action against her husband, but, alas, achieved nothing. However Churana does not surrender and continues the struggle, maybe this struggle is a vain in her country but it is worth doing.
In some densely populated, but not so developed countries to give a birth to a boy is considered as a more acceptable thing. But even if a girl is born, she is despised and the relatives refuse the most necessary things to her: meal, health care and education for benefit of her brothers. As an ultrasonic diagnostics is already extended in these countries, parents have a temptation to get rid of the unnecessary unborn girl with the help of abortion. It is very strange and sounds wildly enough and it is almost impossible, but, unfortunately, the fact remains. India is not the unique country where boys are preferable. When the well-known boxer, the world champion Mohammed Ali was asked, how many children he has, he answered: “One boy and seven mistakes”.
“People want the big weddings, rich gifts and proud sons, but not useless from the economic point of view daughters”, – says Shanta Sincha the chairman of the Indian national commission on the children rights. “The relation to a human life became more severe, that could occur only during a modernization”.
For the first time the term «gendercide» appeared in 1985, it was used by Mary Anne Warren in her book «Gendercide: The Implications of Sex Selection» in which she draws an analogy between concept of a genocide and deliberate women destruction. «Gendercide» is a regular sexualize people destruction: women or men. In comparison with a genocide which concept is defined as a deliberate destruction of people’s race, gendercide