Imagine you are pregnant and you are only allowed to have one child.  It doesn't matter if you are very fertile, just the one child.  In your culture, boys are valued and boys inherit from the grandparents.  What would you do if you find out that the baby you are carrying is a girl?  Would you want to go through with your pregnancy and forfeit any chance you might have of giving birth to a boy?  Because of the Chinese government initiating a one child policy to curb population growth, thousands of young Chinese women are faced with this agonising decision each and every day.  There are abortion clinics everywhere, cunningly disguised as 'Women's hospitals.'  Abortion is big business in China, maybe one of the biggest local industries.

Imagine you are pregnant with your third child, and you are very poor and struggling to make ends meet.  Your husband is working but not bringing home much money.  Your other two children are beautiful little girls.  In your culture, when your girls get married, you have to pay a dowry to the groom's family.  This is quite expensive and you worry incessantly how you will be able to afford to pay two dowry's as you can't save any money.  You don't even have enough now to buy food.  You go for your 18 week ultrasound and find out that you are carrying a girl.  If you give birth to the baby, you will have to pay three dowries!  What are you going to do?  Your husband and is family will be pressuring you to get rid of the baby.  They need a boy to boost the family income as when he marries, he'll bring in a dowry.  In India, especially in more rural areas, women are faced with this kind of decision every day. 

By 18 weeks you can definitely look at the foetus and see what it is going to be.  No, it does not look anything like a tadpole!  It weighs about 190g and is about 12 centimetres long from the top of the head to its bottom.  The fetus is already able to stretch, kick, reach,roll around and suck its thumb.  At 18 weeks you can easily tell a baby's sex.  A girl foetus already has a vagina, uterus and fallopian tubes.  A boy has easily recognisable boy bits.  I think that makes the foetus pretty human, don't you?  At 18 weeks, foetuses are too big to be aborted the same way they abort them at up to 12 weeks.  When people are commiting female foeticide, they can only do this from 18 weeks on, when the foetus's sex is apparent.

For many young girls, abortion is a quick fix to an unpleasant problem.  However, it definitely has psychological effects that are quite longterm.  After all, they have just murdered a life, something that was living inside them.  That has to be a traumatic experience.  To murder a foetus just because it was a perfect girl, has to be even more traumatic, as then you have a partner, you are not a single girl who got careless.  Normal abortions are over quickly and relatively easy.  In China, when young unmarried girls find themselves pregnant, they just nip down to the nearby 'women's hospital' take a number and join a queue.  It's a bit like a production line on a conveyer belt over there.  Or rather, an unproduction ending the production line. 

Up until 8 weeks of pregnancy, all a woman has to do to get rid of the foetus is to take some pills.  This will cause a 'miscarriage.'  However, at 8 weeks the mother does not yet know the sex of her unborn child.  Up until 13 weeks, the foetus can be sucked out of the uterus with a vacuum aspirating machine.  The foetus invariably breaks apart in this process.  However, up until 13 weeks, you still can't tell the sex of the foetus.  At 18 weeks the sex of the foetus can be determined.  The foetus is too big to be removed the same way as in the other procedures mentioned.  They tend to use the 'dilation and evacuation' method.  This method, which is a partial-birth abortion method, is so inhumane it is frightenening.  The mother is put under anaethetic, luckily or I am sure that she would go crazy if she saw what they were doing, and it was previoulsy believed to put the foetus to sleep as well.  This has since been disproved.  The little foetus, is definitely awake during the procedure.  The cervix is injected to make it dilate.  Then the good doctor, who is being paid hansomely by the desperate mothers, uses forceps to pull the foetus through the cervix by its legs until it's head is jammed at the opening, too big to pull through.  The doctor then uses surgical scissors to stab a whole in the back of the babies soft skull, and then sucks out the brain, alllowing the head to collapse and be easily squashed to remove through the cervix.  Incidentally, all of this while they baby was alive.  Surely, they must experience horrifying pain before death? 

The tragedy is, we can't.  As long as China has a one-child policy and parents expect their sons to care for them when they get old, the practice will continue.  As long as India fails to enforce the anti-dowry policy, the practice will continue.  Until we change people's mindsets, the practice will continue.  It doesn't matter that China has outlawed people finding out the sex of the baby when it is in utero.  There is always a corrupt doctor who can be bribed.  It doesn't matter if India has outlawed and made female foeticide illegal.  There are always corrupt doctors who will do it for a price.  In China, an average of 750 000 - 1 million female foetuses are aborted annually.  In India, female foetuses about 500 000 are aborted annually.  But they are not the only countries that do this.  In South Korea, about 30 000 female foetuses are aborted annually.  I really don't believe that all those women are doing it of their own free will.  Society and their partners and family are putting pressure on them and coercing them to carry out this dastardly deed.  In the meantime, doctors are milking it and raking in the benefits, and making it their speciality.  I thought doctors were supposed to save lives, not take them.  In the end, it's always money, that talks, isn't it?