Calcutta, India - Even in Calcutta, a city inured to the extremes to which poverty drives its crowded millions, a teenage mother's decision to throw her "unwanted" baby girl from a hospital window has appalled people. It has also served to highlight the disturbing rates of female infanticide and feticide in India.
Sabita Ghosh slipped out from the maternity ward after midnight to hurl one of her 36-hour-old twin daughters from a 50ft-high window. To Mrs Ghosh, the 19-year-old wife of a farm laborer, the tiny, grilled lavatory window at the end of the Victorian corridor of Calcutta Medical College and Hospital seemed to be the easiest way to dispose of one too many unproductive female mouths. What she had overlooked was that in 1882 the hospital's colonial planners had provided a lush courtyard garden of papaya trees, banyan, gulmohar and creepers, which broke the baby's fall. She survived, but her sister, left in the cot, became ill and died.
When other mothers in the ward noticed that the child was missing, they raised the alarm. Searchers heard a faint noise "like scurrying rats" in the branches of a tree beneath the window, climbed up and rescued the baby, who had suffered only cuts and bruises.
The surviving baby, as yet unnamed, is now in the care of her in-laws. Her mother is under police guard in the hospital, under treatment for high blood pressure and facing possible charges of attempted murder.
Asked to explain her act, she said: "What should I have done with two daughters? We are so poor, how could we bring them up? That was the fear in my mind."
The number of girls in India is still declining relative to boys. From 1991 to 2001 the number of girls for every 1,000 boys under 6 has fallen from 945 to 927, and is as low as 793 in the Punjab. Only the highly educated southern state of Kerala shows a balance favouring women.
Many believe the ability of modern medicine to detect prenatal gender allows couples to abort female unborn children, with sex-determination clinics popular, especially in the northern farming states.
Pro-Life Infonet
08. mai 2001