Several midwives also claim that they fear legal action if they get the sex of a baby wrong. One, who wanted to remain anonymous, told the Sunday Post: “There were threats of legal action if we got it wrong. And some women no longer nurtured the pregnancy if they were told it was a girl.”
After a Freedom of Information request, four out of 14 UK National Health Boards (NHS) boards in Scotland – Grampian, Forth Valley, Orkney and Shetland – will thus no longer reveal an unborn baby’s gender to the mother before birth.
Muslim parents are frustrated by the move and in some areas they are now paying for private scans to reveal whether their baby is a boy or a girl.
According to NHS Grampian, they stopped scanning for gender because medical staff were “verbally abused” when they could not tell the gender of the unborn child.
A Grampian spokesperson told Metro that policy documents will in future state that “gender is not determined” unless there is an urgent medical condition threatening the wellbeing of the mother and child.
There are even posters in hospital waiting rooms “advising of non-gender testing”, according to a spokesperson for the health board, but the campaign has had little effect.
In 2012, the documentary It’s a Girl: The Three Deadliest Words in the World was released, and in one interview, an Indian woman claimed she had killed eight of her daughters.
The Geneva Centre for the Democratic Control of Armed Forces (DCAF) wrote in their 2005 report that a “secret genocide” was being carried out against women. According to DCAF the demographic shortfall of women who have died for gender related issues is in the same range as the 191 million estimated dead from all conflicts in the twentieth century.
In Pakistan female infanticide is still widely practiced and boys are given preferential treatment, receiving food and medical care before the girls do.
In Pakistani society, girls are considered a drain on family resources during their childhood without bringing economic benefits later on.
A CIA fact file has highlighted that an unfavourable sex ratio is a result of sex-selective abortion, childhood neglect of girls and infanticide. However, it emphasises that only sex-selective abortion can affect the sex ratio at birth.
As compared to Child Sex Ratio, the Sex Ratio at Birth is a more robust indicator of the extent to which sex-selective abortion is happening. The average SRB for the entire world is 101 males per 100 females. However, the ratio looks highly distorted in some countries, especially in India (110), Albania (110), Tunisia (107), Nigeria (106) and Pakistan (105).