‘All Those Little Faces’: Elizabeth Vargas Explores India’s ‘Gendercide’
EmailSix months ago, I traveled to India to see firsthand what the prime minister of that country calls a national shame. It is the systematic, widespread, shocking elimination of India’s baby girls. Some 50,000 female fetuses are aborted every month in India. Baby girls are often killed at birth, either thrown into rivers, or left to die in garbage dumps. Its estimated that one million girls in India “disappear” every year.
I traveled first to Delhi, where I met a woman who is a member of the privileged, educated class. Her name is Mitu and she is a pediatrician, married to a doctor. When she became pregnant, she said her husband’s family pressured her to have an illegal ultrasound to see if her twins were girls or boys. There are clinics everywhere in India, offering ultrasounds. We walked down street after street and saw signs everywhere advertising ultrasound services. There are even technicians who pack portable ultrasounds and travel to villages offering their services. The dirty little secret is that many couples use the ultrasound to find out the sex of their baby. If they find it’s a girl, hundreds of thousands of mothers-to-be abort the fetus. 50,000 girl fetuses are aborted every month in India. It is a staggering number. And it has created whole villages where there are hardly any women. We went to one such village in the province of Haryana. Everywhere we looked, we saw boys, young men, old men, but very, very few women. It was unsettling, especially because we knew this was not some freak of nature, but a result of the deliberate extermination of girls.
The reason so many Indians do this is financial. A family with a girl will pay a dowry to her husband’s family when she marries. It is a long cultural tradition in India that new laws cannot seem to break. So a girl means the family will lose money, property, or cattle on the wedding day. A boy means the family will gain those things. The illegal ultrasounds and the illegal gender abortions are used by India’s middle class to guarantee they get sons.
Poor women who cannot afford these services will simply kill or abandon their babies. Some will take their newborn girls to a drop box, usually in the middle of the night, and leave the baby there. One drop box is at a place called the Unique Orphanage in Punjab. We went from the village with no women, to the orphanage with no boys. There are only girls here…60 of them…all cared for by a wonderful woman who will raise each and every one. It is striking to see all those little faces, some two days old, others teenagers, all unwanted by their biological families. They are actually the lucky ones. Their parents didn’t kill them. They now have someone who loves them.
The orphanage is crowded – I counted three, sometimes four girls in each bed — but also immaculate. No one knows their real birth date, so once a year they have one giant birthday party for everyone. As we left the orphanage, I thought back to a temple I visited days earlier where newlyweds make a pilgrimage, to kneel and pray. Not for wealth, or long lives, or success. They pray for a baby boy, and not for a girl. Some of them are willing to kill to make that wish come true.
Watch Elizabeth Vargas’ report below:
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If you’re pro-choice you have no standing being appalled and if you are you’re clearly hypocritical. Whether one has an abortion because they can’t afford another child, don’t want one or in this case don’t like the gender they ended up with are all equally valid reasons to have an abortion.. It’s just a bunch of tissue and cells remember? If you’re pro-life this changes nothing.
Posted by: kal albert | December 10, 2011, 10:53 am 10:53 am
Agree 100% with Kal Albert.
Posted by: keerti | December 10, 2011, 11:18 am 11:18 am
Young people in India are mentally ill and ignorant to allow a “cultural tradition” to murder children and THATS what you are doing. You are murderers and you are using dowry as an excuse to commit it.Shame on the Prime Minister and the government for allowing it. Murders should be tried in a court of law and punished with very long jail sentences.
Posted by: mel | December 10, 2011, 11:19 am 11:19 am
I wonder if Ms. Vargas tried to visit Kerala- the most educated state in India. The literacy rate in this state is above 93% (higher than some states in the U.S.). In this state, the ratio of women to men is somthing like 1058 women to 1000 men. It’s a state where couples, on average, only have 2-3 children (regardless of gender). I know many families that happily stop at one child even if it’s a girl. It should be featured in an article or report like this to show that this problem is not truly nationwide and that it should be a model for the rest of the country.
Posted by: mrs. mani | December 10, 2011, 12:00 pm 12:00 pm
We should be CELEBRATING the widespread availability of “reproductive choice” in India. Right? Right???
Posted by: AJ | December 10, 2011, 12:00 pm 12:00 pm
Funny, I thought the “dowry” was paid the other way around, to the family of the bride … seems with the extreme shortage of brides – that will soon change … the thousands of men “left over” will just be out of luck … stupid system, that will probably lead to civil – or outright war at some point.
Posted by: yeah.i.said.it | December 10, 2011, 12:00 pm 12:00 pm
“Abortion should be safe, legal, and rare”, liberals tell us.
Safe for everyone involved in the process? It’s not very safe for the child. And why should it be rare if it’s so wonderful?
Posted by: tink it Threw | December 10, 2011, 1:27 pm 1:27 pm
Crime against women/girls will only increase now. Girls could get abducted to be sold into marriage. I dont think marital status is going to necessarily be a barrier. Lawlessness in India is ridiculous. And this will probably only increase that.
Posted by: Pm | December 10, 2011, 2:17 pm 2:17 pm
To the person who mentioned about Kerala here, the higher women population in Kerala is an eyewash and is because of the fact men migrate to Gulf and other parts of India, owing to the economic stagnation Kerala has been undergoing since the 1980s. No other reason ! The men who have migrated are not accounted for !
Posted by: KAISER | December 10, 2011, 2:41 pm 2:41 pm
unfortunately, parents of indian girls do not realize that dowry given to their daughter is meant to stay with her. it is called stree dhanam, literally means woman’s wealth. because girls married young and did not inherit property, their share of the family’s wealth went with them when they married. not to be controlled by in laws and the land, gold cash all belong to the woman and help her if there are problems in the marriage and she needs to support herself. if parents and young women undserstood the true value of this tradition, things would be a lot better for women in india. with a deficit in the number of girls now, they can start demanding dowry from the boys’ families.
Posted by: janaki krishnamoorthy | December 10, 2011, 2:59 pm 2:59 pm
Hi
I was wondering if there is an email address? for the pediatrician, Mitu, the one who is suing her in-laws. I just want to get in touch with her and tell her how proud I am of her! Good for her!
I just want to show her my support and to keep on fighting and not to give up!!
Posted by: Lucia Larson | December 10, 2011, 3:01 pm 3:01 pm
to KAISER: Are you serious? Do you know women started leaving Kerala long before men did as nurses?? It was women from Kerala who starated migrating en masse to the west and hte middle east who then brought their husbands and brothers with them! although now many men do leave India as menial labororers for the middle east, I’m not trying to say that Kerala is perfect or that gendercide or sex discrimination does not happen in the state, but it’s not nearly as bad as the rest of India and education has a lot to do with it. Ms. Vargas can walk down the street in India and see an abundance of women.
Posted by: mrs. mani | December 10, 2011, 3:08 pm 3:08 pm
Of all the terrible events that have taken place in the past 2 years… natural disasters.. terrorism.. high profile crimes of all sorts.. I thought I had been desensitized to it all to the point of almost expecting to read about it every day. Then this appeared.. I am now more afraid of humans than I have ever been. Pro Choice vs Pro life is a very complicated debate, but this isn’t or I should say shouldn’t be used as evidence for either side of it. This is about money, not about being too poor to actually raise the child, but about not wanting to give it away with your daughter when she gets married. I am very afraid of how far people will go for money.
Posted by: Anthropophobe | December 10, 2011, 3:21 pm 3:21 pm
I wish an adoption agency could help channel these unwanted little girls to the right homes. I know many people in the US who would be glad to adopt unwanted Indian girls.
Posted by: Barbara | December 10, 2011, 4:12 pm 4:12 pm
India is a large country and some communities may be doing this. but my experience is that this practice is not common in India as a whole (I am from India, have lived in the US 25 years and visit India every year). In western provinces, this may be due to the continuous invasions and forced abduction and rape of the female at the hands of Muslim and other invaders.
But this practice is naturally limiting: there would be a point where this would not prevail: if the ratio goes as low as 600 per 1000 boys, boys would be giving dowry! And it is not really the dowry. It is the huge amount spent on the wedding.
Making the medical procedures illegal is unlikely to be effective. What is really needed is education and efforts towards improvement in the life of the girl child. India’s 2 kids policy is also to blame as is the lack of institutions that take care of the elderly, and the absence of a social security regime.
Posted by: punditji | December 10, 2011, 6:13 pm 6:13 pm
Don’t think for a minute that Americans are above this type of activity. If you presume one-half of all babies killed by abortion in the U.S are female., then 25 million females have been aborted. The extreme liberal feminists claim to be on the side of women, yet they kill females in the name of “women’s rights.” Truly despicable.
Posted by: Benjamin | December 10, 2011, 6:27 pm 6:27 pm
So this is outrageous, but the slaughter of 50M american children is not? The Democrats in this country have enabled nasty nasty atrocities against humankind. History and God will be their judge. Its a shame that the people of India that allow this practice are so low class. Its a shame that the US people also allow the hitler like Atrocites of Democrats.
Posted by: Sickened | December 10, 2011, 7:14 pm 7:14 pm
very sad
Posted by: susanne | December 10, 2011, 11:58 pm 11:58 pm
Good job, Kal, using the murder of real live breathing children to talk about your fetish for clumps of cells.
Posted by: BGad | December 11, 2011, 11:18 pm 11:18 pm
I think that every woman in this country should BOYCOTT all Indian Companies & products made in India, and write emails to them stating the reasoning.
Also, we should do the same with the Chinese products, since China has been aborting “girl child” for centuries,
yeah yeah, I know, we buy Chinese crap since here in America we don’t make any “crap” anymore. Thats why our economy is in the toilet.
Maybe if we do without for a month, boycotting foreign products, and seeing a dent in these foreign companies’ wallets, we can make changes.
Come on, we women are a lot smarter than Politicians think. We CONTROL the majority of the spending dollar in just about every household.
Shame shame on India & China!
Posted by: Catherine | December 13, 2011, 5:05 pm 5:05 pm
Boycotting is a good idea that is making a difference in the policies of companies in this country. check out Life Decisions International, it publishes a boycott list that is updated regularly with companies that support planned parenthood, our nation’s #1 baby killer… and our government pays them with our tax dollars to do this. The prochoice vs prolife issue is really not that complicated as mentioned above. It is simply about selfishness and greed. Any good parent can testify to how selfless the job is to give life to a new and unique person then raise this child. The rewards are tremendous when seen from the eyes of the child and not from our adult greedish perspective that sees a child as a drain on the family finances. We not be critical of India and China without including the US in the list. Why should the reason to end an innocent preborn life matter. It is truly barbaric if one stops for a moment to consider whats happening.
Posted by: David | December 14, 2011, 4:00 am 4:00 am
We Indians are famous for our intelligent minds, involvement in newfound global IT industries, leaders in the medical field, etc. – yet this sick and ancient dowry system still dominates our newfound “progressive” lives. I want dowries ELIMINATED from marriage – marriage should bind two people under love, not fiscal gain – indian culture is poisoned by money money money! Money is, of course, needed to survive, but definitely not needed to thrive.
Posted by: William | December 14, 2011, 4:41 am 4:41 am
This is in no way connected to the pro choice vs pro life debates going on. this is about a barbaric tradition that has only been amplified by technology. in india, they aren’t debating whether or not abortion is right or wrong. they don’t care. it’s about money. whether the technology is there or not, the girls will still be killed. THAT is why the pro choice vs pro life issue we cry about isn’t valid in this situation. they were doing it before we talked about it and they would be doing it regardless of technological advances. the abortion debate is mostly a christian debate (meaning christians are the ones who started and are fueling it), and that’s another reason why china and india don’t care about what you ppl here may think. this type of debate should be religion-free and they have made it so. if we look at this without the religiousness of it all, it becomes about the reasons for the abortions, and not the ideological/religious BS swirling around in the backs of your minds of “right” and “wrong”. why not tie religion to everything and ask yourself if corporations are people under your god’s law or see what religion has to say about destroying our earth for our own gains. if you put religion in one thing, you should put it towards everything right? and for those of you who say “abortion isn’t about religion, it’s just wrong” then you must realize that denouncing abortions right along with religious ppl makes it about religion whether you are religious or not. nobody cares about the specks in the mixing bowl, only the chunks
Posted by: BOB | December 14, 2011, 11:21 am 11:21 am
This is a sick cultural problem not an abortion problem.
Posted by: Dave | December 15, 2011, 2:27 pm 2:27 pm
This special was truly eye-opening, thank you Elizabeth for shedding some light on this travesty. I am thoroughly disgusted that a country would carry out female genocide – instead of simply changing the marriage rituals – making it virtually free for everyone. Bless those who are trying to help.
Posted by: tina | December 16, 2011, 3:02 pm 3:02 pm
You are right. I am pro choice and I therefore have no logical basis to be appalled by this story. The less people with kooky thinking breed the better. This world is gonna fill to capacity eventually, the more reasonable and sane people there are when that happens the better.
Posted by: George | December 23, 2011, 6:29 am 6:29 am
The Prime Minister of India called this genocide against women their “national shame.” We have a similar genocide going on right here in the U.S. Thousands of children with Down’s Syndrome are aborted every year in the U.S (about 90%) because they are viewed as undesirable, unworthy of life, and less than human. People who feel this way about these special spirits are truely missing out on the joy and enrichment they can bring to our lives. There is no difference between the genocide against children with D.S. in the U.S. and the genocide that is happening against female children in India. I would love to see 20/20 do a story about our “national shame” and how Americans de-value certain groups of people that they consider undesirable and unworthy of life.
Posted by: Matt | December 26, 2011, 9:29 pm 9:29 pm
Women of India, demand dowry and that husband comes to your family. You can, there is not enough women. Change it completely!
Posted by: ANa | January 4, 2012, 4:35 pm 4:35 pm
Please revisit this topic with a followup episode. You did amazing coverage and your efforts that went into this particular story on 20/20 were so incredible. And if you do another story on this, please let me know when such will be aired – especially in light of the fact that if my husband and I are understanding what we’ve begun to research on the Internet correctly, it seems that adoptions have just opened back up as of Jan. 1st between India and the US. .
Additionally, we have wanted to start down the road of learning about the processes involved in adopting a baby girl from India. This 20/20 episode on “How to Help India’s Disappearing Daughters” that you aired on TV last month only helped solidify how much we’d like to try to work through all the barriers that currently seem daunting regarding the adoption process between India and the U.S. Do you have any ideas on good adoption agencies to check into, people we should talk to, or any other advice as we start this process?
Any information you can share with us and we start down this road would be incredibly helpful. Thank you!
Posted by: Lisa | January 25, 2012, 2:30 am 2:30 am
no population shortage there so if they feel they can not change a custom of dowrey then perhaps they will all just go extinct a civilization that has sunk to this level perhpas should not be allowed to continue, this is happening in china as well, sounds like a bunch of shallow mean and uncaring people, I will personally boycot India and after what some other peole told me have no desire ever to go there it’s filty, ignorant, backward and teaming with poverty and noone seems to care they are a civilization that is in decline. what kind of people do this??? sick!
Posted by: Karen | March 8, 2012, 8:39 am 8:39 am
Born and raised in a middle class family in India. We are two daughters and our parents gave us atmost freedom and enabled us to be strong women of 21st century. However, I have seen entire society making comments on how it is sad that they have no boy in the house…. I have seen the preference for the male child in every walk of the society and how much even women don’t want a girl child. It’s really sad in a country that is willing to pray to women as deities but not to consider them as equal partners in life. I want to shake the society to change to make them learn to respect and care for girl children or women. I also know.. there are so many people who are trying very hard to do that. It might take several decades to correct the systematic damages done for decades…
Posted by: Subha Sundaram | April 29, 2012, 9:05 pm 9:05 pm