Bay Area resident Nyantara Pais Caputi brought a global, multi-city march against female foeticide to San Francisco in honor of International Women's Day. On Saturday, March 6th, hundreds of people marched in the streets of Australia, India, Kuwait, Ireland, and the United States to bring awareness to "gendercide," the killing of fetuses or infants because they are female, that has resulted in devastating gender imbalances in countries like China and India.
The US leg of the march took place in San Francisco, The Walk for India's Missing Girls, started at the Golden Gate Park and ending at the Indian Embassy with a 2 minute silence.
In the last 20 years, 10 million girls have been killed before or just after birth in India due to cultural and economic reasons dealing with increase in technology enabling discovering the gender of a fetus and the modernization of families that now prefer having a boy for smaller families. In India, this is compounded by the dowry system of giving payment to a groom when a bride is married. Though illegal, it is still widely practiced.
With some states in northern India, like Haryana, with ratios like 861 females for every 1000 males, this amounts to a national crisis. And an international crisis, says Ms. Caput, given India and China's populations and growing economies that shape the world.
Ms. Caputi's involvement reflects how gendericide has global effects on a personal level. Two years ago, Ms. Caputi tried to adopt a baby girl from an orphanage in India. She was aware that there was a cultural bias against girls and thus assumed that there would be many abandoned girls. Instead, she discovered a far bleaker truth.
There was a scarcity of girls and a long waiting list that could take years and thousands of dollars barring many willing parents from adopting and preventing the lives of many girls being saved. When Ms. Caputi delved further into the reasons behind this scarcity, she discovered that many infant girls were being drowned at a lake nearby the orphanage.
As she researched more, she found this "gendericide" occurring all over India across economic, education, and caste boundaries. Ms. Caputi, a nonprofit professional and local filmmaker, began to document the stories she heard in what is now a feature length documentary, "Petals in the Dust."
India has passed two laws in 1974 and in 1994 to ensure that a doctor does not disclose the gender of a child nor is a child aborted due to gender. But, Ms. Caputi says, these laws have been bypassed through bribes to doctors, to the police, or court officials.
“Even when decoys are sent to doctors in violation of this law, no punishment is given,” says Ms. Caputi.
Last year, she joined forces with 2009 Nobel Peace Prize nominee Dr. James Garrow, Executive Director of The Bethune Institute based in Ontario, Canada. Dr. Garrow has worked for over 10 years saving over 31,000 babies in China from the one-child policy through the Bethune Institute's Pink Pagoda campaign. Together, Ms. Caputi and Dr. Garrow organized their contacts and created a multi-city global event to bring awareness to this silent genocide.
The reasons behind this march, says Ms. Caputi, are manifold: education, enforcement of the laws, the elimination of dowry, and pressure to change adoption laws. But the primary reason is to change the fundamental societal belief towards women. That must be changed in order for these other solutions to work, says Ms. Caputi, “Every girl is precious.”
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