Female feticide is a subject that puts the abortion-for-any-reason in a real bind. If abortion ostensibly "liberates" women, what if the impact of this liberation is to target tens of millions of unborn females?

Last January the prestigious British publication The Lancet published a study that argued that as many as 10 million unborn female babies may have been aborted in India over the past two decades.

At the time, one of the authors, Dr Prabhat Jha, told Medical News, "We conservatively estimate that prenatal sex determination and selective abortion accounts for 0.5 million missing girls yearly. If this practice has been common for most of the past two decades since access to ultrasound became widespread, then a figure of 10 million missing female births would not be unreasonable." Jha, an epidemiology professor at the University of Toronto and lead author of the Lancet study, then added, "Women who have already had one or two female children are clearly at highest risk."

Which was exactly the situation cited as the first example of "Abortion in India: Selecting by Gender," a story from the Religious News Service that appeared in the Washington Post over the weekend. The woman interviewed made it clear if the ultrasound showed that the baby she was carrying was a girl, she would be aborted. Abortion has been legal in India since 1971.

"All kinds of famines, epidemics and wars are nothing compared to this," Punit Bedi, a New Delhi gynecologist, told Neil Samson Katz of the Religious News Service. "In some parts of India, one in every five girls is being eliminated at the fetal stage. It is a genocidal situation."

Under pressure from activists, the Indian government in 1994 outlawed the use of ultrasounds to reveal fetal gender. The penalties were ratcheted up in 2002 (three years in jail and a $230 fine for the first offense and five years imprisonment and $1,160 for the second), but prosecutions are virtually unheard of. According to the story, doctors "act with impunity."

"It's a very low-risk, high-profile business," Bedi told Katz. "Not only do the doctors make a lot of money, they are absolutely sure they will not be caught."

Just how staggering is the impact of ultrasounds and sex-selection abortions can be seen in the state of Punjab. There were 925 girls for every 1,000 boys younger than 7 when Punjab's first ultrasound clinic opened in 1979, "according to Sabu George, a public health activist who has criticized feticide for more than 20 years," Katz writes. "By 1991, it was 875, and by 2001, it had plummeted again, to 793, according to national census figures."

But the story was not unrelievedly bleak. Katz reported that in some communities attitudes are changing, He cited Kajampur, a small village in central Punjab where, for several years, equal numbers of boys and girls have been born

"People here aren't worried about carrying on the family name or paying dowries for daughters," said Mohinder Singh, the proud uncle of a new baby girl. "Due to education in the schools, our thinking has changed."

Katz also quoted one young woman from a college for girls in Chandigarh, the capital of Punjab.

"In my personal view, a female is as capable as a male. I would not make a distinction whether I had a son or a daughter," said Georgia Georg, a 19-year-old psychology major from the southern state of Kerala. "Kids are in the hands of God."

If you have any questions or comments, please send them to Dave Andrusko at dandrusko@nrlc.org.