Being female in India is dangerous from conception through adulthood. If you’re not aborted, if you’re not killed as an infant, if you’re not given less food or medicine or care than boys and die in early childhood, if you somehow you make it to marriage, it is essential to make sure your dowry is adequate. The dowry system also results in “dowry death,” in which a man kills his wife because he feels her dowry was not sufficient. These types of murders are often ignored by Indian courts.
In something out of an Orwellian nightmare, Family Planning Police are informed by village spies, who are rewarded for informing on their neighbors. These police drag women out of their house for abortions. Families are fined exorbitant, impossible fees for violating the policies. In the film, one couple tell their heartbreaking story of having to split up their three daughters into different homes, then move away to avoid arrest, leaving their daughters behind.
However, if they violate the policy and have ”illegal” children, these children become un-people. They are denied citizenship. They cannot get a passport or fly on a plane. They will not have access to health care, education, or employment. As far as the government is concerned, they have no right to exist.
As Reggie Littlejohn, president of Women’s Rights Without Frontiers, explains, China has the highest female suicide rate in the world – 500 women per day. Those are World Health Organization numbers. “Could this epidemic of female suicide in China be related to forced abortion, forced sterilization, and female infanticide?” asks Littlejohn. She goes on to answer her own question: “How does a woman feel about herself as a woman if she has killed her daughter just because she’s a girl? How does that make her feel about herself? How does that make her feel about her own right to live, to draw breath on this earth?”
http://liveactionnews.org/international/its-a-girl-documentary-exposes-gendercide/
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