It Takes a Village to Kill a Child
There are moments when the weight of humanity’s cruelty feels almost unbearable, and watching the BBC documentary The Midwife’s Confession brought me to one of those moments.
It uncovered the brutal reality of female infanticide in Bihar (India in general), and it left me shaken to my core. It’s not that these things were new to me — I grew up in India, where stories of gender-based abortions are whispered in hushed tones but rarely confronted.
Even though gender identification is illegal, I knew of people who found ways around it. I had heard and seen the stories of female foeticide firsthand: the quiet termination of pregnancies simply because a girl was not wanted.
I thought I understood this cruelty, but I had never truly felt its full weight until I heard the voices of the midwives in this documentary confessing to their actions.
Female infanticide in Bihar isn’t just about individual cruelty; it reflects deep-seated power imbalances and a caste system that coerces and silences those at the bottom.
The midwives, almost all from lower castes, were caught in a web of fear and obedience. As Hakiya, one of the midwives, painfully confessed, When a girl was born, the family would lock the room, offer us 50 rupees (less than 1 USD), and say, We have too many daughters. This will wipe out our wealth. Once we give dowry to our girls, we’ll starve to death. Now, another girl has been born. Kill her.
Dowry is the money or property a bride’s family must pay/gift to the groom’s family.
The murder would be brutal. Families would instruct the midwives to push salt into the baby’s mouth or use urea fertilizer, suffocating her to death. The midwives were compelled to carry out these horrific acts, not out of fear of the law but of the upper-caste families — Brahmin, Rajput, Bhumihar, Vaishya-Baniya (Upper Castes)— who wielded power over them. Refusing was unthinkable, as they faced threats and consequences from all sides. While these interviews may date back 20 to 30 years, and conditions in India have improved, the mindset that allowed such practices still lingers.
This documentary exposed a reality I hadn’t fully grasped before — a deeply disturbing revelation of how violence becomes normalized when society decides it’s acceptable.
One midwife, Siro, described her first experience of killing a newborn girl: I couldn’t eat for 15 days… all I could hear were the cries and screams. She, like many others, was coerced into these actions repeatedly. Families would say, We can’t afford another daughter; we want a son, leaving her with no choice. Some midwives admitted to killing between 10 to 30 girls in their lifetimes.
These stories forced me to see connections everywhere. If such acts can become routine, what other forms of violence have we accepted as normal? I thought about our world, where so many forms of cruelty are normalized under the guise of tradition or necessity.
This acceptance reminded me of other brutalities. In many parts of the world, animals are raised and slaughtered in cruel conditions — caged, separated from their mothers, denied a natural life.
The movie Okja (by the Oscar-winning director Bong Joon Ho) portrays this vividly, showing sentient animals bred in horrible conditions, aware of their impending deaths, eyes wide with fear.
Watching that film, I could almost feel the terror of those animals, just as I felt the terror of these newborn girls, whose only crime was to be born female in a world that didn’t want them. In both cases, the suffering is systematic, socially sanctioned, and ignored because it has been normalized.
It made me realize how easily we justify atrocities once they become routine. In Nazi Germany, it became “normal” to report Jewish neighbors, even children, to the authorities, sending them to concentration camps where starvation, torture, and death awaited.
No one questioned it because that was what everyone did — it became the fabric of society. In Palestine today, we see a similar pattern: children growing up under constant threat, without basic rights or protections.
For years, the world has watched this unfold, accepting it as a distant reality. These examples illustrate how easily societies can turn a blind eye to suffering, choosing whose lives matter more.
A quote by the dictator, Joseph Stalin, haunts me: A single death is a tragedy; a million deaths is a statistic; resonates deeply here, echoing through the stories from the documentary. One story, in particular, keeps pulling me back — a story that has left an indelible mark on my heart.
It’s about a girl who, against all odds, was saved by a midwife, Siro. The journalist, who had spent 30 years uncovering these hidden narratives, found this girl, now grown, living with an adoptive family in Maharashtra. She was just an infant when Siro, the midwife, chose not to kill her. Instead, Siro fed the baby from her breastfeeding daughter and later entrusted her to Anila, a woman committed to saving unwanted newborn girls.
This child, destined for death, was embraced by a family who loved her fiercely, giving her a future she would never have had without Siro and Anila’s courage. Years later, when the girl met the woman who saved her, they embraced as if trying to reclaim all the lost years. That moment of kindness transformed her destiny — one act of compassion that valued a life others wanted to discard.
Then there was another story from last year, a fragile thread of hope amidst so much darkness. A baby girl, barely a day old, was found abandoned in a field and left to die. When a group of men discovered her, they assumed she was already gone, but as they moved closer, they realized she was still breathing, clinging to life with every fragile breath. Against all odds, they chose to save her.
Now, this baby, once left to die alone, has a family who loves her dearly. Her new mother, seeing a video of her rescue, was moved to tears. She was beautiful even then, she whispered, unable to comprehend that such a precious life could have been discarded.
Her father, with tears in his eyes, called her a fighter from day one. These stories make me wonder how many people would turn away, dismissing them as distant or irrelevant. Yet, here she is, a testament to the power of a single act of kindness, to see life where others saw only an unwanted burden.
These stories remind me that every life matters. They also make me question how humans can be so cruel when we decide not to care. How many other stories go untold because they are dismissed as statistics?
These stories show that individual acts of kindness can change lives even amid pervasive cruelty. They underscore the value of adoption, an often-taboo subject in India, where the notion of pure blood prevails — eerily similar to the obsession with racial purity in Nazi Germany. It’s another way we close ourselves off, limit our compassion, and justify our actions.
So, why do we accept these horrifying realities as normal? Why do we allow ourselves to be numb to such suffering? If a whole village can come together to kill a child, what does that say about us? If we can normalize such violence, what else are we capable of ignoring?
We must confront our roles in perpetuating these norms. We need to question and resist the normalization of cruelty — whether it’s against children in Bihar, animals in a factory, or people in conflict zones. Each of us has the power to choose differently, to see the suffering that society overlooks, and to speak out against it.
If we don’t, we will continue to live in a world where it’s okay to kill a child just because it takes a village to look the other way.
