Female foeticide report is incorrect, says the IMA

CHANDIGARH/NEW DELHI: The Indian Medical Association (IMA) has disputed a report that says more than 10m female births may have been lost over the past two decades.

Researchers in India and Canada said in the Lancet Journal that prenatal selection and selective abortion was causing the loss of 500,000 girl births a year.

But the IMA said pre-birth gender checks had waned since a Supreme Court crackdown in 2001.  There has been no reaction from the Indian government yet.

A spokesman for the IMA acknowledged that prenatal selections used to take place, but said they were not as widespread as before and that the Lancet report was exaggerated.

"This has not been happening for the past four or five years after strict laws were put in place," spokesman, Narendra Saini, said.

The research by Prabhat Jha of St Michael's Hospital at the University of Toronto, Canada, and Rajesh Kumar of the Postgraduate Institute of Medical Research in Chandigarh, India found that there was an increasing tendency to select boys when previous children had been girls.

Rajesh Kumar says the increase in education in the last two decades have brought about little change in mind-set of people who would not shirk aborting female embryos.

Nor has the enactment of law against female foeticide helped the cause as nearly half a million babies continued to be aborted because they were found to be girls.

He said the data was collected in the course of their more than five years long research from atleast one million households, both in urban and rural areas and people of all classes were covered. The census data also came handy to them to arrive at conclusions about the missing girls.

"There is little reliable evidence on female infanticide and the number of stillbirths, which could be a cover up for infanticide," he admitted. However, Indian experts differed over the findings.