“Disappointment only dogs the expectant;
Defeat haunts those who play the game —
Loss belongs to those who possess
O Come with Old Bachchoo, confess, confess...”
From The Chaloonama (XX1.13)

Female infanticide has come to Britain. In India there are copious statistics available as to which castes, communities, regions and religions abort foetuses because, like Lady Macbeth they want to “bring forth men children only”. (One must interpose on Shakespeare’s behalf and insist that it wasn’t a cause he espoused.

He made Lady M say it because the Elizabethans though much concerned with the burdens of dowry, also believed that men had stouter hearts than women and Lady M was crying out for a world in which murder in the service of personal ambition would be emotionally OK).
Several Indian forums gather data on the communities and castes which have an imbalance of males to females. I imagine that it would be, as in the tossing of coins, a 50-50 split and so over time and a large sample one would assume a balance of gender in any population. I have absolutely no biological knowledge or qualification and cannot with any certainty say that there aren’t in particular collections of population some physiological preponderance which makes the birth of males more likely than that of females. I suspect though that there’s no such thing, that the imbalance in numbers can be accounted for by choice, preference, abortion or murder.
A recent expose in the British national press didn’t provide this sort of statistic but it did entrap a few clinics and individual consultant (senior) doctors who offered abortions on the grounds of gender — female gender in the main. The expose recorded and photographed a senior doctor telling an enquiring client that she didn’t care why the client wanted to abort her child — it wasn’t within the realm of her concerns — but she could arrange for a termination of the pregnancy. She was subsequently recorded phoning her colleague with a request for such an abortion with the express caveat that no questions were to be asked. It was a purely commercial transaction.
The consultant doctor who was so entrapped happened to work for a clinic and also happens to be female of Asian origin. She will undoubtedly be investigated and judged by the British Medical Council and even by Her Majesty’s Courts.
One can’t conclude that her being Asian meant that she was approached by a largely Asian clientele who may have thought that she would in some sense “understand” their decision to demand an abortion based on the gender of the foetus. I must admit I was tempted to come to such a conclusion based on the area in which her clinic was situated and the wording of the recorded conversation, but have to admit here that such a conclusion has to be resisted as there is no evidence that female infanticide in its modern form, the data of amniocentesis, has been imported to Britain by Asian immigrants, albeit of the third generation.
The termination that the doctor proposed or agreed to arrange and her recorded conversation about it not being her business why it was required are both illegal in Britain. She may face being struck off and even face criminal charges.
Abortion is not illegal but can be legitimately performed if a medical practitioner certifies that it is being done in the interests of the mother’s or the unborn child’s physical or psychological health. The choice of the gender of your baby falls outside this definition.
I recently read a book by an Indian writer in which a rural community in a part of India murdered newborn female infants by feeding them crushed glass in their first forced dose of bottled milk — as soon as they are born. The monstrous contention of the murderers is that they are administering a painless death to the girl child.
The practice originated in this community’s centuries-old feudal tradition of a refusal to give away a parcel of land as dowry with the grown girl child on her betrothal. It decimated the land of the village. Boy-children gained land, girl-children lost it — not because God or Darwin decreed it, but because of the settlements of feudal agricultural production.Britain today has no feudal agricultural production.
Western societies did indeed do dowries. Shakespeare’s King Lear starts the play by handing or not handing them out. A famous dowry is that of the “islands” which now form Mumbai gifted to Charles II on his marriage to the Portuguese Infanta Catherine of Braganza. Big time.
The dowry tradition, destroyed in Europe by capitalism and the growing political and social equality of the sexes as citizens and as wage-earners in the family, has almost disappeared. Two girls of my family, a daughter and very close niece are to be married this year and (fingers crossed) the young men, both British, to whom they are affianced have made no demands on the family. The prospect of them doing so would be an absurdity.
The thought has crossed my mind that the beauty, education and accomplishments of my daughter and niece merit reverse dowries, but their young men are equal in most or “different” respects to them and social evolution has made its deals.
So it is with most communities of these sceptred isles, except for the Asian immigrants, the Greek and Chinese immigrants and perhaps the tiny Romany population. Traditions linger. Land and money in Punjab, Mirpur, Gujarat or even Birmingham and the local Southall bank, change hands in the arrangements which precede marriage.
Consider China where the liabilities attached to a girl child have been abolished by the communist order. And still the one-child policy of the government has resulted in the not-so-mysterious preponderance of male births.
That should worry India as the shortage of women in China in a generation may lead to them pouring over the Himalayas in quest of what they will no doubt classify as a “natural resource”.