It is reported in today’s Times that, in the north Indian state of Haryana, a doctor has just received a two-year jail sentence for having arranged a number of abortions on female foetuses carried out because of the gender they were.
Apparently, in that part of the world, a girl is somewhat of a liability to her parents. For, upon her marriage, they must stump up a hefty dowry to give to their future son-in-law and then stand by as their daughter is absorbed into the bosom of her new family-by-marriage, along with whatever earnings and other human capital she might bring with her.
Small wonder is it, then, that, with the advent twenty years ago of ultra-sound scans which can detect the sex of a foetus when only 12 weeks old, it has been estimated that something like ten million abortions have been carried out on female foetuses in India, bringing down its ratio of females to males from near par in 1910 to its present level of 927 males for every 1,000 males.
According to the report, the richer the area of India, the greater is the liability that the parents of a girl consider her to be. For example, according to the latest census figures for the Punjab, one of India’s most affluent states, the present ratio of girls to boys is as low as 793 to 1,000.
Precisely because of fear that prospective parents will engage in this same practice here, the NHS forbids them being told the sex of their potential future child when a pregnant woman undergoes her routine scan at 12 weeks of her pregnancy.
Actually, here in Britain, it would be far more likely that, were such a form of sex selection practised at all, it would be male rather than female foetuses who would be liable to culled on account of their sex.
For, here, it is increasingly women who are the more employable gender, and, increasingly, it is men who have become useless appendages for whom there is increasingly less and less use, even as walking sperm banks. For here, as elsewhere in Europe, as women increasingly break through the supposed glass ceiling into the bright but cheerless uplands of its offices and corporate board-rooms, they are increasingly choosing not to have any children.
This suggests a resolution of the problem. If women in both Europe and India were either allowed, or preferably forbidden, to engage in this form of sex-selection of their babies before their birth, then, in aggregate, the sex ratios of males to females in both continents combined would come into balance.
India, having lately proved every bit as entrepreneurial any European country, one can foresee in no time a lucrative inter-continental marriage-market springing up fostering Euro-Indian marriages. European males would not be nearly as demanding of a dowry as their Indian counterparts, and their increasingly benighted parents can be expected to be only too happy to get their unemployable sons off their hands. Meanwhile, the Indian parents of girls would acquire sons at the marriage of their daughters to Europeans, rather than lose their daughters plus a hefty portion of their savings as their daughters’ dowries.
There is only one snag in this market solution to a very real and tragic problem, I foresee. As India becomes increasingly affluent, so will women there choose not to have any children at all of either sex, just like their European counterparts are increasingly doing.
Well, at least that way, there will cease to be any problem in India of abortion being used as a method of sex selection, although to keep it baby-free, one can anticipate abortion there will by no means cease.
However, India's probable increasingly childless society of the future, should it follow Europe's example, is going to make for a lot of loneliness there in old age, not to mention impose, as it is happening in Europe, an increasing burden on its diminishing numbers of young who find themselves having to look after a disproportionate and ever increasing number of frail and elderly folk whose female component may, with hindsight, come to rue the day they chose to remain childless to pursue a career free of the encumbrance of a baby, male or female.
One need not be a soppy sentimentalist to believe there was more than a grain of truth in the verse of the old Beatles song from Sergeant Pepper that ran: ‘And in the end, the love you take is equal to the love you make….’