BHUBANESWAR (India), July 23: Dozens of plastic bags containing the remains of aborted foetuses and newborn babies have been found in a pit in eastern India, police said on Monday.

The officials said the grisly find was probably the result of an underground abortion racket involved in the killing of unborn or newborn girls.

India loses an average of 7,000 girls every day through abortions because of a traditional preference for sons, according to a Unicef report last year.

“We found at least 32 polythene bags from the pit, of which 30 contained skulls and bones of newly born babies,” said Amarananda Patnayak, the director general of police in the eastern state of Orissa.

Police said they had followed up the discovery with raids on several private medical clinics in the district where the finds were made on Sunday to investigate if they were carrying out large-scale abortion of female foetuses.

“At least one of the dubious private clinics was using the pit to dump unwanted foetuses along with stillborn babies and medical waste,” said a police official who did not want to be identified.

Two employees of a medical clinic have also been arrested.

Abortions have resulted in a severely skewed gender ratio in India. There are only 927 females for every 1,000 males, far lower than the worldwide average of 1,050 females.

Sons are considered breadwinners while daughters are seen as a liability because they are expected to support their in-laws rather than their parents in old age. There is also the added financial burden of the dowry system.

Last month, police arrested a man posing as a doctor in an affluent suburb of the capital New Delhi after remains of aborted babies were found in a septic tank at his clinic.

Last year, police recovered 25 foetuses from a well in northern Punjab state.

Tests to find out the gender of the baby and “sex-selective abortions” are banned under strict Indian laws, but prosecutions are rare.—AFP