Where ‘No One Wanted Girls,’ a Dad in India Takes On the Patriarchy
A delivery room epiphany transformed a village headman into an unlikely and highly successful campaigner against prenatal sex testing, which often led to aborting female fetuses.
When the nurse stepped out of the delivery room, her face turned somber as she approached with a baby in her arms wrapped in a blanket. Her voice dropped to a hush, almost like she was ashamed, as she announced to the family: “It is a daughter.”
Nothing about the nurse’s negative demeanor surprised Sunil Jaglan, the newborn’s father. Growing up in the northern Indian state of Haryana, he was accustomed to parents’ strong preference for having sons over daughters.
But something within him snapped, he said, when he offered the nurse money as a thank you gesture, and she refused because she had not handed over a boy.
“Are you also ashamed of yourself?” Jaglan recently remembered asking the nurse when his daughter was born 11 years ago.
That episode transformed him into an unlikely champion of women’s rights in a deeply patriarchal society. He turned the nurse’s four words, uttered almost as a curse — “It is a daughter” — into a slogan for a campaign that health officials say is responsible for saving the lives of hundreds of girls in Haryana.
Historically, Haryana had one of the most imbalanced sex ratios in the country. In 2012, the state had 832 females per 1,000 males. And Jaglan’s own village of Bibipur, with about 1,000 households, had one of the most skewed sex ratios in favor of males in the entire state.
“No one wanted girls,” said Jaglan, 41. “But everyone wanted a woman to do everything in their homes, from working in the farms to household chores.”
In India, the world’s most populous nation, and one which has experienced tremendous economic progress, gender inequality remains deeply entrenched. In many households, especially in rural areas, girls are considered a social and financial burden whose parents still pay thousands of dollars in dowry gifts to a husband’s family after arranging a marriage.
Despite an official ban on prenatal sex testing, advertisements for the service were pasted on market walls and highways across Haryana, and aborting fetuses because they were female was common. Although there are some restrictions, legal abortion is widely available in India through the first 20 weeks of pregnancy.
Topic: These primitive Asian apes gotta stop treating their own daughters like this (Read 272 times)