CHANDIGARH, India - Sikh priests launched a campaign on Saturday against the increasingly widespread practice in India of aborting girl babies in the womb.
With modern medicine allowing parents to learn the sex of unborn children, some Indian families -- traditionally anxious for sons -- are resorting to abortion for female foetuses. This year's census showed a sharp drop in the number of girls born.
Some 250 priests gathered at a Sikh shrine in Fatehgarh Sahib in Punjab to raise awareness against the practice known as female foeticide. The northern states of Haryana and Punjab, heartland of the minority Sikh religion, have recorded particularly sharp declines in the proportion of female births.
"We will use the services of priests at various gurudwaras to take the message against female foeticide to the grassroots," said Manjit Singh, the religious head of Anandpur Sahib temple where the Sikh religion was born. A gurudwara is a Sikh temple.
India's population touched 1,027 million in the census ending in March. But for every 1,000 boys up to the age of six, the census showed only 927 girls, down from 945 10 years ago.
Demographers say the use of modern ultrasound imagery techniques to detect the sex of unborn babies is behind a sharp drop in the number of girls being born in Punjab and Haryana, two of India's most prosperous agrarian states.
A 1994 ban on using medical tests to determine the sex of foetuses has proved hard to enforce.
In Fatehgarh Sahib where the Sikh priests were meeting, the number of females was just 750 per 1,000 males, which a local news agency said was the lowest in Punjab.
India's patriarchal society has traditionally preferred sons to daughters and the preference continues to be strong in the country's rural and semi-urban areas.
The Indian Medical Association estimated in January that about five million female foetuses were aborted each year purely on the grounds that the children would be of the wrong sex.
10:23 08-11-01
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