India: The ugly abortion sales pitch in Rajasthan: Say it’s a girl even when it isn’t

Dec 01, 2016 20:06 IST
by P Srinivasan, Hindustan Times

Ingenuity is often the hallmark of cheats. In Rajasthan, unscrupulous medical practitioners, looking to make a quick buck, have gone a step further by duping pregnant women to undergo abortions after telling them that they are carrying a girl child despite the foetus being a male.

“It is perhaps the mother of all frauds,” points out Naveen Jain, head of Rajasthan’s Pre-Conception and Prenatal Diagnostic Techniques (PC-PNDT) bureau of investigation, and mission director of National Health Mission.

Though sex determination is illegal, the practice is rampant is Rajasthan where a male child is still preferred over a girl by many would-be parents. In a state notorious for its skewed child sex ratio — 888 girls for every 1,000 boys as against the national average of 919, as per the 2011 census — some make a quick buck by offering medical termination services in seedy clinics.

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Source: Hindustan Times