BORN GIRL

INDIA, 2010

FROM JAR TO PLASTIC BAG

If the custom of choking in the terracotta jar has gone out of fashion, the current practice in the Indian countryside is more modern, an activist from the NGO Parivartan testifies:

We find baby girls suffocated in plastic bags thrown behind a bush.

The total announced globally is several hundred thousand girls who have not been born or have been killed in infancy in the last forty years, out of a global population of more than one billion 200 million inhabitants.

SINGLE GENERATION

The shortage of women is starting to be felt in India and this is just the beginning. Some areas are already populated by groups of singles who have nothing to do but drink and hang out. Arranging a marriage, still the rule of the majority of families, becomes difficult, especially to find the wife, but may end up abolishing in practice the dowry system, prohibited since 1961 but still practiced.

ONLY SON

China’s pronatalist policy has imposed only one child per couple since the one-child policy of 1979. As in India, many arrange for it to be a boy. In 2005, demographers identified a gender imbalance with 116 boys for every 100 girls, which has the effect of increasing human trafficking and prostitution.

CROSS-DRESSED

In Afghanistan, it is customary for families with only daughters to disguise one as a boy by the time she reaches puberty. The custom is tolerated by society, which accepts these little tomboys as little men, who frequent men’s society, go out to accompany their sisters, and do everything like boys. In general, they regain their status as women when their menstrual cycle begins, but it is sometimes difficult for these girls to lose the freedom they enjoyed as boys.

MALE SUPERIORITY

At all times and everywhere in the world, women have been considered weak beings, incapable of controlling their impulses.
Even polyandrous societies, which allowed women to take several husbands, did so to perpetuate a male line, the woman often marrying an entire family. During the first observations of male seminal fluid under the microscope, doctors even thought they recognized a small human in a spermatozoon, for a long time reducing female gestation to the simple accommodation of the male egg.