Dr. Sethi should know of what he speaks, since he is in charge of child
protection in Leicestershire and a leading light in a UN campaign fighting the
practice of aborting unwanted girls.
In an interview with British newspaper Eastern Eye, Dr. Sethi said that: "We
know that there are a number of Asian women travelling to India to abort
unwanted female foetuses. I feel very distressed about this. At present,
disclosure of the baby's sex is a matter of parental choice. Making the
disclosure not so readily available will make it more difficult for people to
engage in this practice."
According to Dr. Sethi, a community leader in the Leicestershire area has said
that some ten Sikh families have acted in this way to be rid of an unwanted
pregnancy. As he says, this is of course a small number, but, there again, even
one death is one too many when it has come about simply because of gender.
The main problem in all of this is that there are no official statistics; it
all sounds more like hearsay, and that kind of so-called evidence can be very
dangerous without something more substantial to back it up.
Dr. Sethi is the first to admit this: "We need proper statistics to illustrate
the problem. Data is useful not only to know the extent of the problem, but
also to monitor it on a year to year basis. Presently, what we hear are
anecdotes, but these anecdotes cannot be ignored because they are coming from
very senior and respectable members of the community, like members of the
Leicester Council of Faiths".
The problem with that of course, is that, whatever their faith, some people are
against abortion full stop, so they may have their own agenda in spreading
those anecdotes. Whatever the truth of the matter is though, it is clear that
the only way of solving the problem, one way or the other, is more research and
more monitoring.
