By Cake Staff:
In a shocking news from Rajasthan, [envoke_twitter_link]doctors have been making sizeable profits from fraudulent abortions[/envoke_twitter_link]. Even when the foetus is male, they tell mothers that they’re female, in the hopes that they will opt for an abortion. And, after all, many do.
According to the Hindustan Times report, a doctor can make about INR 60,000/- per case and many medical practitioners are taking advantage of India’s bald-faced reality of son-preference. In Rajasthan, one Dr Mohammad Niyaz has been arrested for conducting these fraudulent abortions.
[envoke_twitter_link]Determining the sex of a child, prenatally, was made illegal in 1994[/envoke_twitter_link]. There was a widespread practice of murdering newborns that were ‘female.’ Things took a turn for the worse when families began making use of India’s abortion laws to stop girl children from being born at all. The effects of both these trends is still very visible in India’s sex ratio, and especially so in states like Haryana, Panjab, Jammu and Kashmir, Bihar, and Uttar Pradesh.
Our country has always had a complicated relationship with the issue of abortion. India may have legalized abortion much before the celebrated Roe V. Wade judgement in the USA, but we continue to grapple with crimes like female infanticide and female foeticide, as a direct outcome of these medico-legal advancements.
The cases in Rajasthan only prove how this problem is still so deeply ingrained. It might be tempting to think that greed for money is outweighing patriarchy here, but that isn’t quite what’s happening. Not only are these fraudulent abortions highly illegal, they have exposed just how far some people will go to profit from a male-centric culture and society.
[envoke_twitter_link]And in the end, the patriarchy hurts everybody[/envoke_twitter_link].