UNITED NATIONS: She strangled her first two babies to death because they were girls, terminated two other pregnancies because the foetuses were female and lost two baby boys to infections acquired in infancy.

Married at the age of 18, Ranu, from the northern Indian state of Rajasthan, is now fiercely protective of her only remaining offspring, a baby boy.

Yet she and her husband Mukhtar have no remorse about the fate of their “missing” daughters.

“I will kill other children if they are born girls,” Ranu said, explaining that she is too poor to pay for their weddings.

All over Rajasthan and the rest of India, baby girls are being eliminated either through sex-selective abortion or infanticide, according to a chilling report by the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) released on Wednesday.

“The girl child is killed by putting a sand bag on her face or by throttling her,” the report quoted Ranu as saying. “It is not a rare phenomenon. It happens without hindrance.”

But the study noted that Indian parents are now turning to more modern methods — pre-natal sex selection — to dispose of unwanted girls, resulting in skewed female-to-male ratios.

“Far from being a practice that occurs only among the poor and illiterate, the practice appears to be most prevalent in regions that boast high levels of educational attainment and relative prosperity,” said the report, titled “The Promise of Equality: Gender Equity, Reproductive Health and the Millennium Development Goals.”

While in developed nations the female-to-male ratios are roughly equal, “in a number of regions in India, ratios have now plummeted to 800 girls born for every 1000 boys,” it noted.

Francois Farah, head of Population and Development at UNFPA, blamed the phenomenon on what he calls an “unholy alliance” between a modern desire for smaller families, available and affordable pre-natal screening technology and abortion coupled with a strong preference for sons.

“But India is not alone: Afghanistan, China, Nepal, Pakistan and (South) Korea all show evidence of sex ratio imbalances that are likely the result of selective abortion and/or female infanticide or neglect,” the report said.

“Although existing laws ban sex-determination testing (in India), fully 60 million girls are now ‘missing’ — effectively falling into a demographic black hole from which, analysts fear, there will be no return,” the report said.

“According to government reports, as many as two million foetuses are aborted each year for no other reason than they happen to be female,” it added.

Experts meanwhile say that the two-child policy that promotes the idea that the perfect family involves one girl and one boy is partly to blame for the dwindling numbers of girls.

Farah said that Indian families were more likely to abort a female foetus if the first child is also a girl.

“They don’t question the very norms that makes girls vulnerable in the first place,” he noted. “They marry her off, or easier yet: get rid of her before birth.”

Meanwhile the sex ratio imbalances coupled with the traditional low status of Indian women is also beginning to change traditional concepts of the family.

“In rural Punjab, where the shortage of women is most pronounced, a desire to keep rural family holdings intact is now driving a trend toward polyandrous unions where one woman, often ‘purchased’ from poorer regions or from lower castes, is forced to be ‘wife’ not only to her husband, but also to brothers and even, according to some reports, her own father-in-law,” the report said.

Such women are subject to sexual and physical abuse, it added.

“The levels of violence in these situations are unimaginable,” said Ena Singh, UNFPA assistant representative for India. “If these kinds of practices become widespread it will be very, very destabilizing for society.”

—AFP