The medical profession is doing all it can though we have to address this as a social evil. People should be proud to have a girl child.

—Dr. Vinay Agarwal, president of the Indian Medical Association, speaking about the first conviction leading to a jail sentence in India for a doctor and his X-ray technician for determining the sex of a female fetus, which they then agreed to abort based on its gender.  Dr. Anil Sabhani and his assistant Kartar Singh were sentenced to two years in jail and a fine for agreeing to abort a female fetus in 2001.

India banned gender testing for fetuses and abortions based on the results in 1994. Traditional biases and crippling dowry prices have made female lives significantly more expendable than those of their male counterparts; medical journal The Lancet estimates that ten million female fetuses were aborted during the past two decades as a result of gender determination, a practice which has ratcheted up the gender imbalance as high as 793 girls to every 1,000 boys in the state of Punjab.

Mimi Hanaoka