Just heard that a large number of girls of Indian origin are missing in Canada. 4472 to be exact in a period of 20 years.
Image credit NayaIndia
The research, presented in the Canadian Medical Association Journal and the online CMAJ Open, looks at more than 6 million births in Canada and reveals that a greater presence of boys among Indian-born mothers may in part be linked to abortions in the second trimester, when parents can learn the baby’s sex.
The birth data was compiled from databases administered by Statistics Canada and the Institute for Clinical Evaluative Sciences in Toronto between 1990 and 2011, and 1993 to 2012, respectively.While the natural odds of having a boy over a girl are slightly higher, they are consistent across the globe: up to 107 boys for every 100 girls. But Indian-born mothers living in Canada with two children had 138 boys for every 100 girls. In Ontario, that number inflated even more among Indian-born women with two daughters, who then gave birth to 196 boys for every 100 girls.
After abortions, the numbers rise dramatically: 326 boys after one abortion, 409 boys after multiple abortions, and 663 boys for every 100 girls following multiple abortions in the second trimester, when doctors can determine the sex of the foetus.
Sex selective abortion is the obvious reason behind this skewed ratio.We all know that female foeticide is rampant in India. But it seems even in a more gender equitable western country like Canada, Indians show the same patriarchal mindset. Indians will be Indians where ever they go.
Answer is not to curtail abortion rights, but to increase the efforts to make the Indian community both in India and abroad more gender sensitive and girl child friendly.
When I first saw the title, I mistakenly thought this was about First Nations women in Canada, partly because many people call indigenous Canadians and Americans “Indians” and because there are 1200 unsolved murders of women in the past 30 years. I saw the number 4400 and thought, “Is the problem even worse now?”
Infanticide is less likely to happen in Canada because child deaths would be almost certainly be investigated and prosecuted. But sadly I have no trouble believing sex selective abortion accounts for thousands of missing girls. I also lived in South Korea where sex selective abortion is still rampant.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3168620/
Well, okay, but even in a more gender equitable western country like Canada, Westerners like Canadians will show the same patriarchal mindset. The cultures certainly mediate how these attitudes get expressed, but it’s not like “Western” = “feminist”.
I have no idea what the number of sex-selected abortions undertaken by white Canadians over that period might be, but there’s at least a strong possibility that the number is higher than the number of sex-selected abortions undertaken by Canadians of Indian descent. If the numbers were similar, it would still mean a very different rate since there are more whites of European descent in Canada, but I’d actually be surprised if sex-selective abortion is so rare among European-descended Canadians that the raw number isn’t at least comparable, and likely more than the number determined by the study above.
Is there data on western-born women of Indian descent and the sex-ratio of their children?
Crip Dyke wrote:
Do you have any reason at all to believe that’s true? I’ve heard of sex selective abortions in the Asian-Canadian community, but never in the white or aboriginal community.
The world average of male to female birth is 107 to 100. Canada is below that at 105 to 100.
Compare that to some areas in India:
India total- 108.9/100
Punjab-118/100
Haryana-120/100
Kashmir-116/100
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Female_foeticide_in_India
The practice of sex-selective abortion in China has created a completely predictable drought of women for all those wished-for male offspring to marry. Their very scarcity has also led to women having more power in partner selection and within their marriage, both good things. India could use some of that kind of rebalancing: I wonder if we will start to see that in coming years.
http://www.newsweek.com/2015/06/05/gender-imbalance-china-one-child-law-backfired-men-336435.html