A Fight to Save Baby Girls in India

The daughters of India

Posted in the NY Times March 7, 2013. By KAMALA THIAGARAJAN

USILAMPATTI, INDIA — Back in the 1980s, this rural patch of the southern state of Tamil Nadu had the dubious distinction of the worst reputation for “gendercide,” or murder of unwanted baby girls, in India.

There were no official statistics, of course. Just as no one keeps a tally of how middle-class Indians today use scans to determine a baby’s sex and whether to abort a female fetus, the child deaths in the Usilampatti region, home to about 85,000 people, were whispered about, not totaled.

Often, births were unregistered, conducted by a village midwife who would then also kill unwanted girls.