An Indian woman is taking her husband to court after he allegedly pressured her to have a sex-selection abortion when he secretly found out the sex of their unborn twin girls.
Dr. Mitu Khurana alleges that her husband secretly asked doctors to take an ultrasound of their unborn twins while she was in the hospital with stomach problems, according to The Daily Mail. Khurana said her husband, Kamal, then pressured her to abort the girls. She refused.
The situation happened in 2004, and the twin girls are now 10 years old, according to the report. Dr. Khurana filed a lawsuit against her husband several years ago, but the case was thrown out due to a lack of evidence, according to the report. She has asked India’s high court to hear her case.
“If, despite all the evidence I have, the accused are allowed to escape then no other women will ever try to prosecute for this type of crime,” Khurana told reporters. “Ultrasounds in India always happen behind closed doors because every doctor knows it’s a crime and will never give the results in writing. If I lose this case it will close the door to any women who want to file complaints in the future.”
The lawsuit could be a landmark case in India, where the abortion and infanticide of girls is a national crisis. India passed a law in the 1990s banning ultrasounds to determine the sex of the unborn child in an effort to curb sex-selection abortions. Khurana’s case is the first under the law, according to the report.
Her husband has denied any wrong-doing. The hospital, Jaipur Golden Hospital, which also is implicated in the case, said it performed scans to check her kidneys and abdomen but did not do an illegal ultrasound to check her twins’ gender, according to reports.
In India, the targeting of Indian girls for sex-selection abortion and infanticide has become a massive gendercide. Experts estimate that there are more than 160 million females missing from India, China and other Asian countries due to sex-selection abortions and infanticide.
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In 2013, U.S. Rep. Chris Smith, chair of the House foreign affairs human rights committee, led a hearing on “India’s Missing Girls” that provided more statistics on the crisis.
“Sex-selective abortion and female infanticide have led to lopsided sex ratios. In parts of India, for example, 126 boys are born for every 100 girls. This in turn leads to a shortage of women, which then leads to trafficking in persons, bride selling and prostitution,” said Smith. “Perhaps the best figures we have concerning the magnitude of the problem come from India’s 2011 census figures, which found that there are approximately 37 million more men than women in India.”
And the problem has only worsened in recent years. The Daily Mail reports that in 2011, India census data shows the population ratio was 914 girls to 1,000 boys, while a decade earlier those ratios were 927 girls to 1,000 boys.
India has attempted to stop the gendercide through laws and cultural efforts. Earlier this year, India Prime Minister Narendra Modi launched a #SelfieWithDaughter social media campaign to promote the value of women in their culture. The campaign encouraged Indian fathers to take photos with their daughters and show the rights and worth of females, Dave Andrusko from National Right to Life reported.
However, the gendercide continues. As LifeNews previously reported, women are often abused and forced to have sex-selection abortions in India even though they are illegal. For example, in 2012, an Indian woman was nearly beaten to death by her husband and in-laws to induce a miscarriage because she was thought to be pregnant with a girl.
In another case, a woman was forced into six sex-selection abortions after her family discovered she was pregnant with girls. The woman, Amisha Bhatt, went to the police and worked to expose doctors who were involved in illegal sex-discrimination tests. She said, “There may have been many such women like me. The doctors were maintaining a secret list of patients on which sex determination tests were being conducted.”
