Posted on 07/28/2007 12:34:40 PM PDT by wagglebee
The wife of a millionaire industrialist has shocked Indian high society by accusing her husband of forcing her to abort two baby girls after taking illegal tests to determine their gender.
Pooja Salotia even accused her husband, Chirag, of trying to force her to have sex with his two brothers to conceive a male heir for the family machinery business in the state of Gujarat. Police arrested her husband, his two brothers and seven other relatives after Mrs Salotia, 32, filed an official complaint in the city of Ahmedabad on Saturday.
Her allegations against 18 people have sent shockwaves across India by breaking a strict code of silence on such matters and exposing the extent of female foeticide among the urban middle and upper classes.
This is a common thing even in rich families a lot of them get their women to abort girls, Mrs Salotia told The Times from Gujarat, where she has gone into hiding after the release on bail of everyone except her husband. In our culture, girls are not important. But I cant tolerate it any more because its insulting.
The killing of newborn girls has been common in rural India, where a daughter is perceived as a financial burden because her family has to pay a hefty dowry when she is married. But since the advent of ultrasound technology, abortion of female foetuses has become increasingly prevalent, not only in rural communities but also among the urban middle classes.
An international team of researchers estimated last year that ten million girls had been aborted in India over the past two decades, while the Indian Medical Association says that five million are aborted annually.
The result is an increasingly severe gender imbalance, with only 927 women for every 1,000 men in India, according to the 2001 census, down from 945 women a decade earlier.
The worst imbalance, however, is in Indian cities where those with money have ready access to private doctors, who take bribes to skirt a 1994 ban on ultrasound gender tests.
A recent survey indicated that there were only 882 women for every 1,000 men in Defence Colony, one of the upmarket districts of Delhi.
Pratibha Patil, Indias first woman President, called at her inauguration on Wednesday for an end to female foeticide, two days after police found 30 female foetuses dumped in a well in the state of Orissa. However, Mrs Salotia is the first woman from Indian high society to admit publicly to the forced abortion of a girl.
The daughter of a government official in Gujarat, she graduated from university with a degree in commerce. Her sister is a doctor and her brother an architect both based in London. She said that her ordeal began after she gave birth to twin girls in 1997, a year after she married her husband.
She claimed that his family started to harass her and even demanded compensation of £30,000 from her father because she had produced two girls. When she became pregnant again in 1998, her husband forced her to abort at four months after an ultrasound test showed the child to be female, she said. He said he didnt want another baby girl. He wants a boy because hes concerned about who will run our empire thats the mentality.
In 2001 Mrs Salotia was again forced to abort after an illegal gender test revealed she was carrying another girl, she said. After that, she said, her husband started frequenting sexologists and even suggested that she have sex with one of his two brothers as they both had sons. When she refused, and threatened to commit suicide, her husbands family became even more abusive, beating her regularly.
She said that she endured their treatment until this year for the sake of her twin daughters, Dhvani and Dhruvi, who are now 10. She said she had been living separately from her husband for a month, in one of his six houses, and that he had filed for divorce.
Police said that they were searching for several doctors she accuses of performing her abortions.
India may be aborting it's future away, but they are definitely not among the worst. Just look at the rate in the US. Think about how many illegals we would not "need" if we just allowed our own children to be born and to grow up to contributing members of society...
This male/female ratio thing is very bad news. When young men can’t find available yonug women, bad things happen.
Thanks now it makes sense
I know they have to be in the mix somewhere, probably somewhere near the top
The graph posted above? The first even arguably Christian country is number five.
Ireland’s not on there, is it?
Kill for the love of Kali. Kill! Kill! Kill!
Don’t worry. I’m sure that Amnesty International is all over this.
“..primarily Christian populations have higher abortion rates.”
Don’t count European countries having primarily Christian populations. That distinction vaporized half a century ago.
He was too cheap to pay their dowries. sarc/
The free market will correct things in less than a generation. Part of it also comes from Indian inheritance laws, where sons and daughters do not get an equal share, which leads to families giving daughters their inheritance in advance in the form of a dowry.
The government of Maharashtra State in India has recently passed a law designed to promote gender equity in property inheritance and discourage the practice of dowry-giving. The law provides for the right of a daughter to inherit parents' wealth on an equal basis with sons. Until this law was implemented in Maharashtra, daughters did not have the legal right to claim an equal share of an inheritance because of a loophole in national law. In most cases they had to be content with a dowry.Dowry is officially supposed to represent a daughter's share of her family's wealth, in the form of a pre-mortem inheritance from her parents at the time of her marriage. Dowry is also given by the parents of a daughter to compensate the groom's family for supporting her after her marriage, since she is often prohibited by social customs from earning a cash income that would contribute economically to the family into which she is married. Women may also become an economic burden in the event of widowhood, which is likely since brides are typically much younger than grooms.
However, dowry has deteriorated into a method of extortion of wealth from bride's to groom's parents, leaving many parents of daughters in debt and encouraging the practice of female feticide - an increasing social evil in the state of Maharashtra, as elsewhere in India. This practice occurs as a result of great social pressure on parents to arrange socially acceptable marriages for their daughters without having the economic means to do so.
Simply passing a law equalising sons' and daughters' claims to land and other immovable property will not solve the problem of dowry-giving. In many regions of rural India there is a strict social taboo on a daughter inheriting land, since if she does so the land is lost by her father's lineage and passes instead to her children, who belong to the lineage of her husband. Furthermore, women in many rural areas are economically reliant on male kin. If the woman is widowed without adult sons or brothers-in-law, and her dowry was small, or was seized by her husband's family, she may be unable to earn a self-supporting income and be forced to sell her land inheritance share to a complete stranger.
Hmmmm...by his rationale shouldn’t he get himself sterilized? He is, after all, the one who determines the sex of a baby. So he’s making girls-not boys. Even the most backward humans can learn that on the internet, or from a doctor.
It’s YOUR problem, sahib!
LOL, talk about massively bad moves.
This makes sense from the grandparents viewpoints, because sons support their families (in exchange for eventual inheritance), while daughters become part of their husbands' families
Ah yes.....
All cultures are equal...
Multiculturalism adds color to the fabric of society...
Diversity is our strength....
There should be no borders or restriction on immigration....
Absolute bull squat!
This is a plan for the civilized world to commit suicide..
The Turd World is so named for a reason...
It does seem like a cultural time bomb waiting to go off. If women become fewer and fewer in the general population, obviously more and more men are required to remain without progeny.
I wonder why no family with marriageable daughters has thought about charging a groom dowry? I wonder how much longer? 10 years? 20 years?
The same thing is brewing in China as well.
All Cultures are Equal Alert (except Western Cultures, which are inferior to all others).
.
Note how low Poland is. Even note the additional decimal place to the right in there.
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