Image by World Resources via Flickr

A question that often leaves even thinking people befuddled is how a mother could kill her own baby! If we fail to fathom what actually makes a woman kill her own child or not protest when others smother it to death, the most important question is this: is it her intent? Her will? Or someone else’s?

Isn’t this will, intent generated and perpetrated over many centuries subjugating women to subhuman status? The time immemorial prejudice is so internalised by women that they hate their own girl babies and carry out murders with clinical precision.

If not for her victimised state, how could she not feel the first throbbing of the heart, the fluttering inside her womb, the self-awakening movements of the foetus, its clingingly tender skin, and the heart-warming cries reaching for her breasts?

Instead, she remains mute when her backyard is turned into a graveyard. She turns stone-deaf when the baby begs for life as if it were a hazy call to a vague someone. She walks on her little one’s ruins as if it were a nightmare. And this nightmare fades into the past as the high waters of a dreamy future with her much-craved son invade her, dragging drifting unwanted memories with them.

While the mother remains cocooned by the silken excuses weaved by her near ones, the outside world gets busy with “women are the worst enemies of women” and “female foeticide is the only way to prevent population and “raise the ‘value’ of women” campaigns!

The end of imagination.

Related articles

• Female foeticide in India (part 1): Murder in the womb
• Female foeticide/infanticide in India-2: traditional methods of killing babies
• Female foeticide in India (3): swatting them like flies…