It takes something to go horribly wrong for the dark secrets of India’s sex-selective abortion industry to be dragged into the open, something similar to what happened to Hansa Gadhvi.
Married for seven years, she lived with her two young daughters in the town of Morbi, in the Rajkot district of Gujarat in northwest India. When she told her husband, Khodu, that she was expecting their third child, he demanded that she go for a sex-selection test.
According to a complaint filed by her father, Khodu Gadhvi handed over 15,000 rupees to Dr Manish Gosai at the town’s hospital. The scan showed a female foetus.
The abortion was carried out that evening and Hansa was discharged straight after, despite still bleeding. She bled to death the next day.
Dr Gosai, a former president of the town’s doctors’ association, denied the charge, and insisted that he did not possess a scanner, when he was raided by the police several days later.
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Catching the abortionists is not easy — and prosecuting them is even more difficult. The jailing of five doctors last month for performing illegal scans in Gurgaon, a shiny new suburb of Delhi, looked impressive. But the case was registered in 2003 and the additional fine levied was just 1,000 rupees, barely a tenth of the cost of a single scan.
There is no shortage of innovative schemes to help to reverse the prejudice against girls and alleviate the economic factors that sustain it. One village plants a stand of mango trees each time a girl is born and the proceeds from the sale of the fruit are saved for her daughter. In Haryana, one of the worst-affected states, two public health campaigns were combined to award subsidised toilets to families with girls.
But changing attitudes takes decades and, in the meantime, a technology that is supposed to save lives is robbing India of millions of her daughters.