Female infanticide why

Additional notes and information General This type of preference for sons often results in the neglect of the basic rights of girls, including their health, nutrition and education and, on a more extreme level, may lead to female infanticide, which may occur deliberately or through forms of neglect, such as starvation.

Sources Based on United Nations Relations Related term:. This practice is mainly due to the fact that, in some cultures, males are considered to be socially more valuable than women. Moreover, female infanticide is sometimes related to the control of the population. In China, infanticide is also practiced, mainly due to the one-child policy even though it existed before , which states that each couple can have only one child.

Many parents prefer to have an abortion before the birth, if they know that the child is a girl. However, among people who do not have this possibility, infanticide at birth can be performed. This practice goes directly against the Right to Life due to gender bias, it especially violates the Rights of girls.

Female infanticide and abortions have caused a great imbalance between the sexes in some regions. In , a UN report estimated that approximately million girls worldwide had disappeared, 80 million of them in China and India.

In the future, this could lead to an increase in girls trafficking or to forcing women to marry more than one man. Advocate for the protection of child rights by calling for an end to fires and deforestation in the Amazon Rainforest!

Skip to content. Infanticide Infanticide: the violation of the Right to Life Infanticide is an act that goes directly against the Right to Life of children. Despite the egalitarian nature of Chinese society, many parents believe that having a son is a vital element of providing for their old age. Therefore in extreme cases, a baby is killed if it is not of the preferred sex, because of the pressure not to have more than one child. Infanticide occurs in most cases as a way of restricting poverty and population.

Throughout history infanticide has been regarded as a productive and efficient way to control starvation and poor standards of living caused by over population. The male bias in China is deeply rooted in Chinese traditions which leads parents to want their first child to be a boy. Confucianism regards male children as more desirable since they provide security for the elderly, work and are important for the performance of ancestral rites.

Son-preference in Hindu cultures is largely based on the fact that men are better providers, and that sons are required for the proper performance of funeral rites. The Sikh religion is one of the most gender-neutral, and explicitly proclaims the equality of men and women. This makes it more surprising that censuses in India show there are far more male children than female children in the Sikh community. In practice there does appear to be a strong preference for boys in the Sikh heartland.

The community appears to give greater respect to the parents of boys, and boys themselves. In response the Sikh religious organisation Akal Takht has re-emphasised that women are equal to men. It has banned neo-natal sex identification, selective abortion and the killing of female babies.

Female infanticide was common in pre-Islamic Arabia. However, by the time of Muhammad, and the revelation of the Qur'an female infanticide was strictly forbidden, and regarded as seriously as adult murder. You shall not kill your children for fear of want. We will provide for them and for you. To kill them is a grievous sin. Search term:. Read more. This page is best viewed in an up-to-date web browser with style sheets CSS enabled. Studies of systematic infanticide based on gender have tended to concentrate on female children — female infanticide — but there are instances where male children are targeted, one historic example of which was in Japan.

British colonists in India first became aware of the practice of female infanticide in , during the period of Company Rule. It was noted among members of a Rajput clan by Jonathan Duncan , then the British Resident in Jaunpur district of what is now the northern state of Uttar Pradesh.

Later, in , officials noted that the practice was so entrenched that there were entire taluks of the Jadeja Rajputs in Gujarat where no female children of the clan existed. According to Marvin Harris , another anthropologist and among the first proponents of cultural materialism , these killings of legitimate children occurred only among the Rajputs and other elite land-owning and warrior groups. The rationale was mainly economic, lying in a desire not to split land and wealth among too many heirs and in avoiding the payment of dowries.

Sisters and daughters would marry men of similar standing and thus pose a challenge to the cohesion of wealth and power, whereas concubines and their children would not and thus could be allowed to live.

Sociobiologists have a different theory to Harris. Indeed, his theory and interest in the topic of infanticide is born of his more generalised opposition to the sociobiological hypothesis of the procreative imperative. Harris believes this to be a fallacious explanation because the elites had sufficient wealth easily to support both male and female children. Another anthropologist, Kristen Hawkes , has criticised both of these theories. On the one hand, opposing Harris, she says both that the quickest way to get more male warriors would have been to have more females as child-bearers and that having more females in a village would increase the potential for marriage alliances with other villages.

Against the procreative imperative theory she points out that the corollary to well-off elites such as those in northern India wanting to maximise reproduction is that poor people would want to minimise it and thus in theory should have practiced male infanticide, which it seems they did not. There is no data for the sex ratio in India prior to the British colonial era.