Tradition and Technology in Precluding Girl Child in India

Abstract

Antifemale bias permeating across the world has perhaps percolated in the perpetuation of the awful practices of gendered selection at birth in India. In the backdrop of pervasive vulnerability of women in the globalising world, this article interrogates into the roots of the practice of female infanticide and foeticide in Indian society.

This article elucidates the continuum of female infanticide to female foeticide as the transmission of the tendency to eliminate females from after birth to before birth despite legal proscriptions through modern methods of infanticide and globalisation of gender selection technology in contemporary Indian society. Premised on certain sociological propositions on social change, this article argues that female infanticide and female foeticide are collective gendered crimes entrenched in the detraditionalised continuum of the tendency of women preclusion at birth from rural to urban and traditional to modern society.