Some Indian Parents Forcing Daughters To Become Sons
June 30, 2011 by Personal Liberty News Desk
In India, officials are concerned about a disturbing trend: parents forcing their daughters to become sons through sex change operations.
“Madhya Pradesh state government is investigating claims that up to 300 girls were surgically turned into boys in one city after their parents paid about £2,000 (more than $3,000) each for the operations,” read an article on The Telegraph’s website.
The issue of preferring boys to girls is a serious one in India, where “India’s gender balance has already been tilted in favour of boys by female foeticide — sex selection abortions — by families who fear the high marriage costs and dowries they may have to pay. There are now seven million more boys than girls aged under six in the country,” the article read.
“The surgery, known as genitoplasty, fashions a penis from female organs, with the child being injected with male hormones to create a boy,” the article read. Doctors are accused of wrongly conducting the surgery, which should only be performed in cases where a child is born hermaphroditic (having both male and female genitalia), on normal girls.
“People don’t want to share their property or invest in girls’ education or pay dowries. It’s the greedy middle classes running after money. It is just so shocking and an outright violation of children’s rights,” Ranjana Kumari, of the Centre for Social Research and one of India’s leading campaigners against female foeticide, told the newspaper. “In India we say God resides in that house where there’s a woman but that has evaporated because of all this greed.”
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