Female Infanticide (Foeticide)

Islam and Female infanticide - Dr. Zakir Naik

Death Before Birth

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24/10/01 Born to Die

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Islam and Female infanticide

Dr. Zakir Naik

Islam prohibits infanticide or killing of female infants. This is considered a

serious crime of murder.
Surah Al-Takvir Chapter 81, Verses 8 and 9 (81 : 8-9)
When the female (infant), buried alive, is questioned, for what crime she was
killed. (17:31), (6:15)
In pre-Islamic Arabia killing of female infants was very common and very often
the moment a female was born she was buried alive.
Islam not only prohibits female infanticide, but it forbids all types of infanticide,
irrespective of whether the infant is a male or female. It is mentioned in Surah AlAnam chapter 6, Verse 151 (6:151).
Kill not your children on a plea of want. We provide sustenance for you and for
them. Come not near shameful deeds, whether open or secret. Take not life which
Allah has made sacred.
A similar guidance is repeated in Surah Al-Isra Chapter 17, Verse 31 (17:31).
Kill not your children for fear of want: We shall provide sustenance for them as
well as for you. Verily the killing of them is a great sin.
In pre-Islamic Arabia killing of female infants was very common and very often,
the moment a female was born, she was buried alive. However, after the spread of
Islam in Arabia, Al hamdulillah, this evil practice has been discontinued for the last

1,400 years but unfortunately it is yet prevalent in India.

In a BBC documentary film titled Let her die shown in the programme
Assignments, the statistics of female infanticide was given by Emetic Buchanan.
It has to be a Britisher who came all the way from Britain to give us the statistics
and make a documentary film in a country which has the maximum rate of female
infanticide in the world. According to the statistics compiled by them, everyday
more than 3,000 foetuses are being aborted in India on being identified that they
are female. If you multiply this figure with the number of days in a year (365 days)
we understand that more than one million female foetuses are aborted every year in
India. It is practised maximum in the state of Tamil Nadu and Rajasthan. There are
big bill boards and advertisements saying Invest Rs.500/- and save Rs.500,000,
signifying that you do tests like Amino sentesis or ultra sonography which cost
about Rs.500/- and on identifying the gender of the foetus if it is a girl you can
always abort her and thus save Rs.5,00,000/- which is usually spent in the
upbringing of a girl and giving dowry in her marriage.
According to a report of the Tamil Nadu Government Hospital, out of every 10
female children born, 4 are put to death.
Female infanticide has been present in our country for centuries. No wonder the
female population of India is less than the male population.
According to the 1901 census of India, there were 972 females for every 1000
males. According to the 1981 census, there were 934 females for every 1000 males
in India and the latest statistics of 1991 tell us that for every 1000 males there are
972 females in India. One can realise from these census reports that the ratio of
female population is declining every year. Earlier only female infanticide was
being resorted to, but now with the advancement of Science and Medicines to suit
this act, there has been added another crime of aborting female fetuses. It is no
wonder, therefore, that the urban areas of Bihar and Goa showed 1054 and 1091
females respectively for every 1000 males and according to 1991.tically fallen to
911.
Islam not only prohibits female infanticide but also rebukes the thought of
rejoicing on the news of birth of a male child and not rejoicing on the news of the
birth of a female child.
Surah Al-Nahl (Chapter 16), Verses 58 and 59 (16:58-59)
When news is brought to one of them of (the birth of) a female (child), his face
darkness, and he is filled with inward grief!
With shame does he hide himself from his people, because of the bad news he has

had! Shall he retain it on (sufferance) the choice they decide on?

In Islam the girl child is entitled to support, and upbringing and good treatment.
According to an authentic hadith related in Ahmed, Prophet Muhammad (Pbuh)
said, Anyone who brings up two daughters properly they will be very close to me
on the day of Judgment.
According to another hadith whoever brings up two daughters properly and treats
them kindly and justly shall enter paradise.
There should be no partiality in bringing up of sons and daughters.
Prophet Muhammad (Pbuh) always spoke about justice and kindness towards a
child whether it be a daughter or a son. Once a person in the presence of Prophet
Muhammad (Pbuh) kissed his son and put him on his lap and did not do the same
for his daughter who was with him. The Prophet (Pbuh) objected and told the man
that he was being unjust and that he should have also kissed his daughter and
placed her on the other lap. The Prophet (Pbuh) not only preached about equal
justice to sons and daughters but also practised it himself.

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Death Before Birth
By Lalitha Sridhar
19/08/2004 http://www.islamonline.net/

It is like a countdown...972, 964, 955, 950, 940, 930, 929...but this

one is different - not a cause for joy.
So reads the blurb of an activist pamphlet as it poignantly draws attention to
the declining female sex ratio in India. Between 1981 and 1991, the
numbers of girls born, as compared to the number of boys, fell unremittingly

in all Indian States except Kerala.

In Tamil Nadu, while the Infant Mortality Rate fell from 125 in 1970 to 54 in
1996 (which means more babies survived), the juvenile sex ratio (between
ages 0 to 6 years) declined from 1010 in 1941 to 948 in 1991 (showing that
for every average 1,000 of the population, 62 fewer girls lived to grow).
Missing Babies and Fetuses
The New York based Population Councils 1991 Review estimates the total
number of missing females worldwide at 60-100 million. Of these, 32
million missing females are (ironically) found in India. Figures are
painstakingly compiled from the gender differences in the Infant Mortality
Rate and Neonatal Mortality Rate (which indicate the existence of female
infanticide).
Even within Tamil Nadu, certain districts are more vulnerable than others.
The Department of Public Health survey of 1995 put the at birth sex ratio (a
better indicator of feticide than the general biological average) at a
disturbing below-900 in the districts of Dharmapuri (893), Salem (the worst
at 839), Periyar (876), Coimbature (893), Thanjavur (883) and Kanyakumari
(866).
Only the first two of these are economically backward areas while the rest,
along with other districts with adverse sex ratios such as Nagapattinam,
Nilgiris, Pudukottai, Virudhanagar and Perambalur belong to the
prosperous/developed blocks.
Across Tamil Nadu, there has been a significant increase in the so-called
ultrasound clinics that openly offer sex determination and preselection
tests - they are a flourishing business in small townships like Namakkal,
Usilampatti and Salem (the last alone has 73 such shady enterprises).
All agencies concur that while official figures may like to quote a certain
decline in female infanticide (even the country paper presented at the Fourth
World Conference on Women in Beijing claimed a narrowing of the gender
gap in the child mortality rates), it will remain a dubious claim since
technology has only advanced the age (or lack thereof) at which the girl child
is done away with.
How History Repeats Itself
The practice of female infanticide is documented to have existed in Europe in
the early twentieth century and was found across Pakistan, West Asia, China
and North Africa. The causes ascribed to that old practice include, besides
the control of the population and socio-religious practices such as
superstition and the disposal of handicapped/illegitimate babies, the genderbased selective killing of female children.
One of the earliest records of female infanticide in India points to a clan of
Rajputs in Uttar Pradesh, the discovery of which is credited to Jonathan
Duncan, a British official posted in Northern India. Subsequent to this, the
British Raj passed the Infanticide Regulation Act of 1870 to curb, among
other variations, the widespread incidence of neonaticide (the killing of a

baby within the first 24 hours of birth).

To date, the problem is more widespread in the states of Bihar, Uttar
Pradesh, Rajasthan and West Bengal and found only in some fairly
widespread, but no less disturbing, pockets of Tamil Nadu. It has been
suggested (but not proven) that the practice died down for a while in
between but has staged a dramatic revival in the last two decades alone.
How Society Fails
Underlining the absence of a societys collective conscience, the practice of
female infanticide is the result of typically tradition-bound gender
discrimination and extreme patriarchal perceptions. A woman without sons is
considered barren and she risks being turned out of her marital home - a
situation that has to be avoided no matter what the cost.
The more immediate and economic reasons include socially predetermined
expenses that have to be incurred for girls: for everything from the cradle
ceremony to marriage to even menopause, which the natal family of a
woman is required to provide for. One advertisement for sex-selective
abortion exhorted, Spend Rs 500 now to save Rs 50,000 later.
The media as well as the perpetrators take poverty as explanation enough,
almost justifying a decision motivated by abject despair. But it has been
equally well-documented that these very same families somehow find the
wherewithal to raise one or more sons. The practice of female
feticide/infanticide also plagues even the economically better off families.
Cold-Blooded Murder
In modern times, the practice of killing female babies in Tamil Nadu was first
brought to the attention of the country by two expose articles - one which
appeared in the Tamil biweekly Junior Vikatan in December 1985 and the
other in India Today in June 1986.
In the former, the journalist was passing by a village and a stray
conversation led to an old woman being drawn into a discussion about newborn girls when she remarked in a give-away, abruptly terminated one-liner,
In our parts, if girls are born one after the other, they (her parents) make
their hearts (as hard as) stone and....
Only after much prodding and reluctant discourse did the case (with identity
of the interviewee concealed) make the headlines and much media hype
followed. The result was that infanticide activities went underground.
In a case reported in January 1994, a field worker found that a healthy 3.5
kilo baby girl discharged from the hospital had disappeared on a subsequent
visit to the childs home. Lodging of a report, apprehension of the mother
and exhumation - from the front yard - of the infants body followed, leading
to forensic reports suggesting manual strangulation.
Often elder women or mothers-in-law commit the actual act, almost always
within the first week of birth. In a conundrum of embarrassing coincidences
for the government, SAARC (South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation) declared 1990 as the Year of the Girl Child and 1991-2000 as her

Decade too, at a time when a woman was the Chief Minister of Tamil Nadu.
The administration generally ended up being at defensive loggerheads with
the media over the discovery and critical coverage of what came to be
categorized under Death by Social Causes. In the Konganapuram Block
records of 1990-91, 151 female infant deaths were attributed under this
heading, as opposed to the figure of 19 for male babies.
How to Stop It?
Legal action to prevent female feticide/infanticide included the Prenatal
Diagnostic Techniques (Regulation and Prevention of Misuse) Act in 1994,
which aimed at restricting the uses of technology to detect only genetic
abnormalities in the unborn infant. It is worth noting that while the feminist
agenda supports the right of a woman to abortion, it draws a clear line when
it comes to sex selective abortion, indisputably a gender discriminatory
crime.
Whatever else media attention did or did not achieve, it drew essential focus
to the issue. There are over 30 different organizations in Madurai and about
25 in Salem that are tackling the problem as a key piece in the larger picture
of rural development, health, education and institutional care.
Many independent organizations now network to pool funds and share data,
either informally as in the case of the loose coalitions Kurinji and COPFI
(Coalition for Prevention of Female Infanticide) or more vocally as with the
SIRD (Society for Integrated Rural Development) whose successful CASSA
(Campaign Against Sex Selective Abortion) has become an umbrella
organization demanding that the declining juvenile female sex ratio find a
place in the Assembly elections agenda across party lines.
The Indian Council for Child Welfare (ICCW) has focused on socio-economic
development of the females. Role models such as one trained woman
blacksmith running a foundry and another a bicycle repair shop serve as
sustained inspiration and guidance for the weaker others that are still
discriminated against.
Gender sensitization of the community through interactive street theatre
sangams, and monitoring, guiding and counseling high risk mothers (who
already have one surviving girl child) are a few of the many activities that
are having slow but sure success. NGOs are also working with village elders
or the panchayat by approaching them privately and speaking up for
persecuted women before a case comes up for hearing and even providing
temporary care to abandoned babies and encouraging the families to spare
something for their care. In addition, grassroots demonstrations and activism
raising slogans against infanticide have been ongoing efforts to curb
something which is too deeply entrenched to coerce.
In fact, most NGO agencies shun media attention that only serves to drive a
wedge in carefully cultivated relationships which address deeply personalized
issues on the basis of mutual trust.
The girl child is still dying too young, often even before she is born. She has
no voice nor any protection but in an ode to her right to survive, she is still

heard and defended.

References :
Death by Social Causes by Elizabeth Francina Negi
Watering the Neighbours Plants by Sarada Natarajan
The Unborn Girl Child by M.Bhuvaneswari
Lalitha Sridhar is a Chennai-based freelance journalist keenly interested in
development issues. Your emails will be forwarded to her by contacting the
editor at: ScienceTech@islam-online.net

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