INDIA - The Preference for Baby Boys, Revisited

Individual men can father many more babies than individual woman can birth, which means in over populated India clinging to this ancient tradition is detrimental to all of India.  It also points out a society that still treats women as chattels to be bargained away.

"Pervasive Preference for Baby Boys Over Girls Prevails Among Parents in India" PBS Newshour 4/23/2013

Excerpt

JUDY WOODRUFF (Newshour):  Next, from India, worries about the age-old bias favoring male children.

Special correspondent Fred de Sam Lazaro updates a story he did a dozen years ago about the skewed sex ratio of children born in India.

It's another in our Agents of Change series.

FRED DE SAM LAZARO (Newshour):  For some months, Pooja, a 22-year-old mother of three, has been coming to this crisis counseling center in a lower-middle-class neighborhood of Delhi.

Pooja is trying to keep her family together.  Her husband and in-laws have tried to throw her out.  Their problem, all three children are girls.

POOJA, Mother:  The family says they need sons to carry on their name and since I have only three daughters, they tried to trick me into signing divorce papers so that their son could marry again.  That led to some violence when I refused, and I had to run away to my mother's house for safety.

FRED DE SAM LAZARO:  The preference for boys goes back millennia.  Boys performed the last rites at their parents' funeral.  They carry the family name and when they marry they bring a dowry into the family.

Dowries were outlawed 50 years ago, but they're pervasive and mistakenly believed to have roots in Hindu scriptures, says Ranjana Kumari of the Delhi-based Center for Social Research.