In October 1991 Amartya Sen wrote a
controversial article in The New York Review of Books, “More
Than 100 Million Women Are Missing”. In the piece, he tried to estimate the
large numbers of “missing women” in countries like India, China as well as
other Asian & African countries by comparing with the numbers that could
have been expected if men and women had received similar care in health,
medicine, and nutrition. He arrived at a figure of more than 100 million
missing women. This horrible number conveys a terrible story of inequality and
neglect leading to the excess mortality of women. Decades of deprivation have
led to the systematic extinction of the female population in many parts of the
world. I am deliberately using the world “extinction” because the figure of
missing women as described by Professor Sen in the developing world is simply
too huge to ignore. It exceeds the total number of casualties in both World
Wars plus all casualties of all major epidemics of the twentieth century,
including those who perished in the current AIDS pandemic. Sadly, it seems
women are an endangered species in some parts of the world.
Two decades later, the situation is
still not much different in Nepal, the country where I was born. Although the
sex ratio still favors excess female population in the country, it by no means
indicates atrocities committed against women are less here than anywhere else
in the world. Nepal is still a notorious place for women to live, where modern
day slavery exists in the form of girls’ trafficking and domestic servitudes.
The extent of gender based violence can be imagined by the simple fact that in
2011 alone 61 cases of witchcraft were reported by the
national NGO INSEC,
the majority of which were women who were branded with a hot iron and fed
with excreta. Yet, an additional and increasing threat for the ‘endangered sex’
in my country nowadays is antenatal gender identification and sex-selective
abortion. Professor Sen was right when he emphasized that the gender bias
reflects itself in higher mortality due to unequal access to resources and
services. But here in Nepal, the horror can start well before a girl is even
born, in her mother’s womb. To put it bluntly: in one of the poorest countries
of the world where daughters are still widely perceived to be of less economic
value and the local tradition continues to demand that women’s families give
dowry at the time of marriage, what better way of conserving scarce resources
than to get rid of these baby girls as early as possible? There is no
exact figure on how many sex-selective abortions are conducted every year in
the country; however, limited available evidence
shows that health workers admit it’s a problem. Worryingly, they even reckon
the problem is increasing. True, health workers are well aware of the pressures
many Nepali women face to bear sons and many of these health workers might be
worried that these women may seek unsafe services elsewhere when unable to
obtain abortions in a hospital. But there’s an incentive in the practice
for many of them as well: it is not exactly a secret that the mushrooming
numbers of sonography clinics in the major cities in Nepal are involved in
antenatal sex determination – in fact, it’s a major source of income for them.
Perhaps more surprising is the
indifference and apathy on the part of civil society which till now has opted
to stay mute on the issue, by and large. This could indicate a decreasing moral
threshold of the Nepalese society: many people probably consider sex-selective
abortion to be the lesser of two evils if the other option is to give birth to
a female infant who has to live a life of relative deprivation and faces a
substantial risk to become the victim of gender-based violence for much of her
life.
During a recent event on 14 February 2013, more than two decades after
Sen’s seminal article, many physically assaulted Nepalese women were finally
able to overcome their trauma and dance in front of dozens of television
cameras in solidarity with one billion women worldwide to end gender based
violence. But the question that remains unanswered is, how many more decades do
we have to wait for someone to come to the front and shake his or her
head to say no to female feticide in Nepal?
