India’s children's minister has called for mandatory prenatal gender tests to try to counter the illegal abortion of unborn girls.
Maneka Gandhi, minister for women and child development, said that the ban on prenatal testing should be lifted, and instead, every foetus should have its sex determined and registered by law.
Prenatal testing has been illegal in India since 1944 in an attempt to prevent the abortion of unwanted girls. Ms Gandhi acknowledged that the ban, rather than protecting unborn female babies, has triggered a booming black market trade in illegal gender testing and backstreet abortions.
The minister proposed a system that would force parents to produce medical certificates to account for any miscarriage or termination.
“A proposal is under discussion in the cabinet to evolve a system that can easily track attempts at female foeticide,” Ms Gandhi said in a speech delivered on Monday in Jaipur. “Since the gender is already known, and given the law, families would be compelled to go through with the pregnancy.”
Women's rights groups have condemned Ms Gandhi’s proposals, saying a change of policy would be a mistake and result in women from rural areas coming under increased pressure from their families to have an abortion.
"This is not a very productive idea. In fact it could make things worse," Ranjana Kumari, director of the Delhi-based Centre for Social Research think-tank, told AFP.
"This might work among educated women, but not for large numbers of women living in rural areas who are still under enormous pressure to live up to the social and cultural traditions to have a boy."
India’s entrenched patriarchy sees the regular abortion of girl babies. A study in British medical journal The Lancet found that as many as 12 million girls had been aborted in the past three decades in India.
Following an investigation into hospitals and clinics in Delhi by Indian authorities, reported in the Times, one hospital in the capital was discovered to have delivered only 285 girls for every 1,000 boys in the past year.
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