An excerpt from that article is chilling
At AIIMS (All India Institute of Medical Sciences), the Ford Foundation and others gave money for the research, by determining the sex of the foetus: a female foetus could be aborted. A young doctor who worked at the AIIMS in the 1970s writes about one such experience that left him shaken. He saw a cat carrying off a freshly aborted foetus, blood dripping.Funding from the West had achieved wanton killing of foetuses in India on a massive scale.
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In 1975 AIIMS, the country’s most prestigious medical school, unveiled India’s first amniocentesis tests at its govt teaching hospital.” Other hospitals quickly started offering the test. Doctors not only readily identfied the sex of the foetus, but also offered to abort if it was a female foetus. Several AIIMS doctors published papers “explaining the project as an experimental trial with potential to be introduced on a larger scale.”
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When the British conducted the first census in the Indian colony (in the last quarter of the nineteenth century), they found a skewed gender ratio, even then.They looked to Hindu texts to explain this bias against the girl child but actually found thatHindu texts condemned the killing of foetuses, without exception. So much so that even John William Kaye, the East India Company historian, had to concede in his “curmudgeonly way”: “It is almost the one exceptional case of a barbarous custom that has not the sanction expressed or implied, by precept or example, of the monstrous faith [Hinduism] which these people profess.”
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In a bid to keep the land within the family, and because British law forbade daughters from having property rights, the reasoning gravitated towards killing off daughters.
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The three chief takeaways from this are:
First, the New Yorker piece is an extremely shoddy piece of journalism that should have been published in a Ford Foundation pamphlet at best, and certainly not in any self-respecting magazine.
Second, the role of the Ford Foundation and its culpability in perpetrating the mass abortion of female fetuses has never been fully investigated. If done so, it may well be one of the biggest crimes of the twentieth century.
Third, the rush to anoint western aid agencies as saviours of the Third World reeks of a neo-colonial racism that still seems rampant in much of western writing.
or else .. Well things could have been interesting..
