Fifty million missing women

I saved this to put into one of my ocassional "interesting but not really work" posts but I couldn't bear to hide it. We all need to know what is going on even if it makes us feel uncomfortable, both with the actuality and with our inability to do anything to help.


Fifty Million Missing Women via 3quarksdaily by Abbas Raza on 12 August

From the Mount Holyoke Alumnae Quarterly:

According to Nobel Laureate Amartya Sen, there should be millions more women and girls living in India than there are. The acclaimed economist compared the natural ratio of men to women globally with the ratio in India, and twenty years ago had calculated that India was "missing" about thirty-seven million women. That number has escalated to fifty million today. ... Numbers tell the story in chilling detail:

• Some one million female foetuses are aborted each year.
• Midwives in some regions regularly kill the infant girls they deliver for as little as $1.50.
• Dowry-related murders of women stand at about 25,000 cases a year.
• A UNICEF report found that the mortality rate for girls under five is more than 40 percent higher than for boys the same age.
• WHO and UNIFEM estimate that one pregnant woman dies every five minutes in India.

These conditions persist due to a deep-rooted mind-set Banerji describes as "unresisting acceptance of female genocide".

More here. [Thanks to Marilyn Terrell.]