Let Me Be Born Mother

By Asha Singh Gaur Santosh Srivastav

"Women have been cursed to live the life of secondary sex for centuries, and only women can change this reality. Not only in India but in the entire world, women are aching for a ray of hope to illuminate their world and remove the darkness spread in their life. All they need is courage, determination, and continuous effort.

Santosh Srivas

• Language: English
• Publisher: Ukiyoto Publishing
• Release date: Oct 11, 2023
• ISBN: 9789361728624

Book preview

Let Me Be Born, Mother!

I

Saw a movie some time ago named Matrabhoomi which left me deeply agitated. The movie is based in one of the villages of India where every girl child is suffocated to death; by drowning in a bucket full of milk right after they are born. This killing is called Doodh Peeti. Every boy in that village was a bachelor as there were no girls left in the village for them to marry. A family of four boys manages to get a girl. The girl was married to all four, and they planned out days for each brother to sleep with her. They were neither emotionally connected with her, nor did they love her. Each boy waited for his turn just for sexual gratification. Looking at his son’s contentment, their widowed father also uses the girl to satisfy his sexual desire. The girl turns into a living corpse catering to the sexual needs of her husband and their father.

This is not just a story, and it is not confined to a single village. There are various villages, cities, and metropolitan cities in our country facing a similar situation. In a village named Bamla in Haryana, 70% of young boys are single. Boys, with the newly discovered sense of sexuality and longing, have no one to dream of or look forward to. There are no girls in their village and the neighboring villages to become their prospective brides. There are only boys in every family. There is a huge void created by the absence of girls in these communities. They would have shared secrets with their mothers and played with other girls, displaying their bangles and anklets. Now, these families wait desperately for noisy bangles to fill this emptiness. To deal with the situation, a few wise men (the ones who had decided to kill every girl child in the first place) resolved to buy girls from far-off villages to marry their boys. Which means first kill and then trade; what a shallow thought! People who had money bought the priced girls to marry their boys leaving the weaker section to deal with the void. As a result, sexual crimes increased, and women became vulnerable. To tackle this, men imposed the parda system on their wives to save them from other men.

Madurai is one of the religious cities of Tamilnadu known for its numerous temples. While on duty around one of these temples, a policeman saw an old woman walking into the murky puddle holding something tightly wrapped in cloth in her hands. She was standing knee-deep in the dirty water; the policeman caught her and took the package from her. He was surprised to see an innocent three-day old girl child wrapped in the cloth. The old woman was taking the little girl to drown her in the puddle. She was wrapped so tightly that she choked to death on their way to the hospital. It is disappointing to see such things happen in a state where the chief minister in power at that time was a powerful woman, Jayalalitha. People in Tamilnadu do not like girls and most of them are killed right after they are born. It is debatable that even women in this state are unhappy that they are born as women, and they don’t want to give birth to another woman. Grandmothers here are alert about their grandchildren; in case it is a girl child they are either destroyed right in the womb after sex identification through medical advancements like ultrasound or sonography or are killed right after they are born. They don't feel any shame in killing the girl child. They either kill them themselves or bribe the midwife to do it. Midwives feed the baby with milk with rice bran in it. Needle sharp edges of rice bran cuts through the partially developed guts of the newborn child leading to internal bleeding and finally, the death of an innocent life. Sometimes the babies are poisoned with toxic herbs in linseed oil.

Recent news from Meerut left me disturbed. People from this city bribe the midwife with an amount as small as one thousand to fifteen hundred to kill the girl child. The midwives either suffocate the girl child to death by pressing the wet towel on their nose or stuff their nose with opium resulting in death. Sometimes the child is made to lick opium causing immediate death and the corpse is thrown in the dustbin like daily waste from the house. Family members do not even look at the girl and the news of the desired killing fills them with satisfaction. One of the elderly women from a family tells a TV reporter, 'A girl is a girl; she has to die, either this way or another'. Krishna Devi from Haryana made headlines on every news channel for giving birth to her fourteenth girl child at the age of fifty-five. On inquiring further, she said that there were no machines to identify the sex of a child at that time and hence she kept giving birth to the girls. Oh! And what if there were machines for sex determination?

U.P, Haryana, Punjab, and Delhi are some of the wealthy states of India, and still, women to men ratio in these states are as low as 718 women per 1000 men, which has impacted the overall sex ratio of the country. Our history indicates that killing a girl child is a known and old practice in India. As per Hinduism, a son is considered as the descendant of the family. He is also the one who lights his parents’ funeral pyre during their last rites, leading them to heaven. Initially, this practice was limited to Hindus, but with time female feticide has increased in Muslim, Sikh, and Christian households as well. Female feticide started in the poor and unprivileged communities but today it has plagued affluent classes as well. The question is, why? The rich don’t have problems like dowry, which was the root cause of female feticide.

Women’s organizations across the country have lost their sleep over the decreasing women-to-men ratio in India. In the past two decades, around 10 million girls were killed before birth, after sex identification through ultrasound. The shocking fact is that most cases of feticide include educated women. Today, when women are aware of their rights and are fighting for them, why are they not standing against female foeticide? Why are they supporting it? Why do women disrespect their race? How can our society be so insensitive to continue such brutal killings based on sex discrimination? The entire world has moved on toward different horizons, but we have not changed our outlooks toward girls and boys; we still treat them differently. Whether it is the birth of a girl child or her entire life, both are considered worthless. This discrimination creates an imbalance in the family and has an overall impact on equality and harmony in society.

The statistics shared during the Asia Pacific Conference held in Hyderabad indicate grave danger. In case female feticide continues at the current rate, then by 2050 there will be 20.8 million fewer women per man in India. So, where exactly is our society heading? The trend clearly indicates the birth of an unstable culture that will lead to the end of civilization. Aren’t we heading towards our end? Female feticide proves that our thoughts and values are still tied to illogical beliefs. The knots of these illogical beliefs will not untangle on their own; we will have to free our values from these knots. It is said that Maharaja Ranjit Singh’s mother was put in a pot and buried alive soon after she was born, but a spectator dug the poor child out and saved her life. The same girl grew up and gave birth to a son, Maharaja Ranjit Singh who was also known as the Lion of Punjab, who every Indian is proud of.

Earlier girls were killed after they were born but now, they are killed even before their body has taken proper form. Ultrasound was invented to identify genetic abnormalities in the fetus, but in the 1970s, doctors started using this technology for sex determination. This resulted in female feticide, which soon flourished into a huge business.

In the past forty years, our national sex ratio dropped drastically between the years 1991 to 2006. This was the time when several plans and organizations were working towards the security and overall development of the girl child. Many seminars and meetings were organized at the national and international levels with Save Girl Child as the common slogan. Girl’s Year and Girl’s Decade were also celebrated. However, everything seemed superficial, and female feticide continued. The plans that started to save the girl child proved useless and failed. UNO asked India for an explanation for a smaller number of females than males in the population. In most countries around the world, the number of females was higher than males. India’s sex ratio is 927, which indicates 927 women per 1000 men. UNO in its recently published report on the population, 'India Towards Population and Developmental Goals' has said that fetal sex identification and abortion is a symbol of disrespect to women in Indian society.

What is the reason? Why a woman, full of love and compassion becomes so helpless that she accepts such a wrongdoing? Why she finds it better to kill her girl child in the fetus than to face the curse and nag after she is born? The culprit is our society. We still have families where women are solely held responsible for giving birth to a girl child and subjected to insults. Giving birth to a girl child is the most torturous moment for a woman in an orthodox Indian family. She is mentally and physically harassed for not giving birth to a boy and sometimes it ends in a divorce or the man getting a second wife.

In the nineteenth century, during British rule, there were strict punishments for people who were found guilty of murdering their daughters. Their property, pension, and position were ceased, and some were even sentenced to death. Especially in Punjab a lot of families were named Girl Killers and were sentenced for it. Fear of such strict rules and punishments gave a new lease on life to girls. What kind of fear will give them a new life now?

Like a bud, a girl develops in the mother’s womb, and from the fifteenth day of pregnancy her life starts taking shape, and she grows little by little every day. Every part of her body starts taking shape and her lips start opening. Her beautiful lips look even prettier when they smile, laugh, and giggle. After a baby is born, the very first word that comes out of these delicate lips is Mother. Her small fingers look so lovely in the womb and her cotton soft feet are the ones she will walk on to reach her mother once she starts walking and jump into her lap with joy. She will grow into a young girl and then be old enough to marry and become a wife. She will miss her home at her in-laws and will ask a thousand questions thinking of her mother-

'My heart is still with you, Mother, and I worry about you. Who must be oiling your hair? Who cleans the front yard when you can’t? How is our brown cow? Did she give birth to a male calf or a female calf? What is the color of the calf? Your back gets sore when you sit for hours praying to Lord Shaligram, you should take care of yourself.'

But her mother doesn’t think about her. She wipes off the very existence of her little girl in the womb. It is a new and popular tradition to crush a woman right in the womb. A tradition to kill a woman, who gives birth to an entire world, to civilizations, makes a family and is the life of all the rituals, festivals, and prayers.

In 1984 Dr Bernard Nathanson from the USA made a documentary, The Silent Scream depicting the entire procedure of abortion starting from the ultrasound image to the actual procedure. Here is a description of this heart-breaking procedure in his words.

'When the procedure started, we could see the 10-week-old girl moving in the womb displaying a heartbeat of 120 beats per minute and sucking her thumb at times. As the abortionist’s suction tip begins to invade the womb, the child rears and moves violently to avoid the instrument. Her mouth is visibly open in a silent scream. The child’s heart rate shoots up dramatically to 200 beats per minute as she senses aggression. She moves violently away in a pitiable attempt to escape the instrument. The abortionist’s suction tip begins to rip the baby’s limbs from its body, ultimately leaving only her head in the uterus as it is too large to be pulled from the uterus in one piece. The abortionist attempts to crush her head with his forceps, allowing it to be removed.'

Within fifteen minutes this brutal game of murder was over. After watching this video, the doctor who got this film made, left his profession forever, but did women get freedom from their destiny forced on them by society? What is the use of celebrating Women's empowerment year? A national seminar of women journalists was organized in Delhi to celebrate the Women's Empowerment Year on women’s day. The seminar was organized by the Central Board of Social Welfare and Women Networks Ltd. where 50 women journalists were invited from different states. I was invited to be a part of this seminar from Maharashtra. In those three days of the seminar, journalists shared shocking instances that they had to go through during their assignments just because they are women. But what is the use? The speakers and audience both in such seminars are the women who are already aware and empowered to voice out their concerns. Women from rural India who are uneducated, lack a voice and are most exploited still do not understand the meaning of women empowerment. They don’t know, where a handful of women from cities and metros have reached, and what they have achieved. They are not aware of their legal rights and the steps taken by the government and private institutions for their betterment. But there is one thing where our rural women are at par with urban women, killing their girl child before or after birth. This may be because they feel that instead of living an unwanted and abused life, their girl child shouldn’t come into this world.

But giving up is not the solution. Changing these rules by giving birth to a girl child is the answer to 'The Silent Scream'. In the words of young poet Hemant -

Let me be born, Oh Mother!

So that with the ink of flames,

holding the pen of fire,

I write the song of rays,

which will bury

the rotten and sodden

past of women,

locked away in chests and

rise like the sun from the east.

The question is, what is the reason for killing a girl child in the womb? Why is a woman killing another woman? Why doesn’t she feel hesitant and horrified? These questions are a cause of concern for women’s organizations and for women who are well-educated and aware. The topic is regularly discussed and argued during seminars to reach a solution. In various countries across the world, female feticide has become a practice. Not only in India, but in Indian communities in London, and other parts of Europe, female feticide is spreading like an epidemic. As per research done at Oxford University, many women of Indian origin, kill their girl child in the womb with hopes of getting a boy. The reason is cultural pressure.

In Indian culture the ideology of considering girls as liability is deep-rooted. Though the government has passed a law against female feticide, most of it is just on paper and it is growing as a business. Why is society not able to change its attitude towards the girl child? Why do all the programs started for the betterment of women, always fail? Parents still feel it’s useless to give birth to a girl as she will get married one day and will go to a different house for which they will have to bear the burden of arranging a dowry. What will they get in return? She is of no use even during old age, as according to our culture a girl’s parents cannot accept any hospitality, even water at the daughter’s house as it is considered a sin and the daughter cannot leave her family to nurse her parents. She cannot even offer fire to their funeral pyre. As per religious beliefs, a soul gets moksha and peace only when a son lights his parent’s funeral pyre. All these misconceptions are enough for parents to consider a girl’s life as useless and hence she is muffled right in the womb.

Such Indians are giving birth to some baseless beliefs and wrong customs. Women are tied with chastity but for men, it is almost absent. A man’s respect is gauged by his job, position, education, and success. But in the case of a woman, even if she is working at a higher designation, is educated and successful in her career, the moment she gets into a physical relationship out of her marriage, she is announced as characterless bringing a bad name to her parents and in-laws as well.

Not only in different societies in India but in every country across the globe there are various irrational customs and practices related to women which are still unchanged. The speed at which the world developed could not free these societies from such bad practices. These topics have been discussed time and again by the governmental and nongovernmental bodies and laws were also reinforced. Several meetings, discussions, workshops, and seminars were organized by the women’s organizations to voice against such wrong practices. They also rallied against them, but a handful of women and a few aware families can neither change society nor these ill practices.

Years ago, Swami Vivekanand had said –

The root cause of too many widows in every house is child marriage. If we reduce child marriages, the number of widows will automatically reduce.

But did child marriage stop?

Child Marriage - Playing with Both Body and Mind

I

t sounds impossible that a woman gave birth to 69 children in her lifetime of 75 years. This is a record set by a Russian woman for giving birth to the maximum number of children in one life, as recorded in the Guinness Book of World Records. She lived from the year 1701 to 1782. Around three centuries ago giving birth to dozens of children wouldn’t have been a shocking thing as till a few decades ago giving birth to eight to ten children was considered normal for a woman. However, it is difficult to believe when a fifteen-year-old becomes a mother of two kids and a girl less than twenty-four years of age gives birth to her seventh child in the revolutionary and progressive environment of the twenty-first century. Our population calculation statistics are full of such examples. In India, there are around fifteen million brides who are still minors and out of these, three million are already mothers to at least one child. It is quite clear that people still don’t take the laws against marrying a minor girl seriously, which declares such marriages illegal. Most backward areas where child marriages are common may still be unaware of these laws because of illiteracy. But is it fair to let such ill practices flourish because of such excuses? The law cannot teach people whether a body is ready for marriage and childbirth, it is common sense. The roots of this ill practice date back to Indian History.

The custom of marrying minor girls started in India in the Vedic times and we could also see the dreadful impact of this custom. No one questioned this practice before social reformation started. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, social workers like Raja Rammohan Roy brought the required consciousness in society against child marriage and made people question this practice. Even after aggressive work of over one and a half-century, child marriage is still followed. As a result, at the age when young girls are supposed to play and enjoy their childhood, they are burdened with the responsibility of their kids. An even more dangerous fact is that on average, most of these girls become mothers to at least five children at a very young age.

Child marriage has already become a big problem in India and Bangladesh, and it has become very difficult to eradicate it. In Bangladesh, 75% of girls are married before they turn eighteen years old, and in India, this count is 57%. Some girls get married when they are just eight to nine years old. The main reason behind this is poverty, illiteracy, and discrimination toward girlchild.

The moment a girl starts growing and gaining height, mothers start worrying about their marriage, and fathers feel trapped in helplessness created by poverty. People who take advantage of their helplessness are the Sheikhs from Arab countries. They pay handsomely for marrying these minor girls, and parents also accept the offer and bid farewell to their responsibilities towards their daughters. After the deal, these girls neither get to meet their parents again nor do they get to come back home. Their only mistake was being a girl. Parents don’t even think about their innocent life. They can’t even imagine the hell their girl has to go through at the hands of these Sheikhs. With the deal, starts the sexual exploitation of their immature bodies. Many of them get pregnant and some die during childbirth. Once the Sheikhs get bored, they sell these girls to brothels from where starts a life of insult, neglect, and abuse. What was their mistake? Why are these girls sold to Sheikhs who are the age of their grandparents? The real culprits are parents or maybe poverty that makes them do this.

Child marriage is not only dangerous for minor girls from a health perspective, but it also leads to many other ill practices and crimes. It directly impacts the mental development of a girl. In the age when they are supposed to play with dolls they get introduced to sex. They are neither mentally nor physically ready for sex. This untimely exposure results in the development of hatred, frustration, and fear towards sex which stays with them for life as sex phobia.

In Rajasthan, east Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, Andhra Pradesh, and a few other states of India, child marriages are organized as a group event. They neither fear the law, nor the health issues they may expose their child to. At the age when they are supposed to gift their daughters with good education and make them independent, they gift them with early motherhood, mental illness, unhealthy life, and an unpredictable and insecure future.

The publicity created by the governmental and non-government organizations working in this field has been successful in bringing a wave of change. More than anyone this has brought awareness to girls. Lalita Marskole from Kaji Jamthi village in Baitool in Madhya Pradesh got her wedding stopped. She was just fifteen years old when she went to the collector to inform him that she was a minor and her parents had already fixed her marriage. She shared the date and time of her wedding as well. On the day of the wedding when the groom had reached her door with wedding bands still playing, police raided the venue right on time and stopped the wedding. Lalita’s father was arrested for breaking the law. Lalita has set an example for other girls to fight against wrong practices spread across our society. Often girls are not able to take legal action against their parents. They keep tolerating all kinds of exploitation and unknowingly become the root cause of a gigantic social evil.

India is still considered a backward country and America as one of the most developed countries. The irony is that, though there is no child marriage recorded in America, the number of minor mothers has been on the rise. In one of the high schools of Gloucester in New York, seventeen teenage girls who were just fourteen to fifteen years old decided to get pregnant outside marriage. All seventeen pregnant girl students have taken sole responsibility for giving birth to their children and taking care of their babies post-delivery. This news was enough to give sleepless nights to Catholic groups. The school superintendent said that the new generation is getting distracted. They live an obsessive and passionate life and are not ready to listen to anyone. But is this the complete truth? This young generation has seen, heard, and understood what their grandmothers have gone through. They know how a woman has been harassed and abused over the centuries. Even after several declarations and announcements of programs for women's empowerment, the huge difference in women to men ratio seems impervious. Even after aggressive promotions in the field of education around 66% of women across the globe are still illiterate. Healthcare organizations are still miles away from them because of this every year around six million women meet with untimely death, mostly due to complications related to pregnancy. Around eighty million women get partially disabled. We have strict laws, but laws are rarely followed, and malpractices stay as they are.

For the past twenty-five years, the issue of child marriage has been raised time and again in International Women’s Summits but still, minor girls are being married rampantly. Society follows a two-faced policy, when the situations are favorable, it completely neglects the laws, and when they are unfavorable it looks to the same law for help. Decades ago, in 1906 in the UK, a woman had said –

'I will neither follow any law which was made without my involvement nor accept the power of any court that enforces those laws'.

Around a century after this declaration, seventeen minor girls from Gloucester High School in New York decided to become single mothers which jolted the entire catholic community.

Whether it is the case of child marriage or a lawful marriage, dowry has been a horror for our society for centuries. Years ago, a program was aired by the famous TV channel Doordarshan, by name 'Endowment or Death'. Several speakers spoke about dowry deaths and girls who finally got an exemption from these unfair demands and abuse related to it. They tried to raise this issue as the gravest social practice. They tried to sensitize young men towards it and appealed to them to neither accept dowry nor let their family members accept it, but it is still spreading like wildfire.

Burnt Alive

M

ahatma Gandhi was strictly against Dowry. He used to say that women are not cattle for us to exchange money in her name. According to him, dowry is a disgrace to any civilized society. However, his thoughts failed to stop this practice during his time. Today it has become an inseparable part of society and has reached households where it was almost non-existent before. Earlier Muslim communities did not have a dowry, but now they too are getting infected by this bug. Dowry was not practiced in poor households but with time even poor communities are struggling with dowry issues.

Dowry started as a healthy practice according to which a girl’s parents used to give her some money during her marriage to be used in the bad times and which was solely her property. Her husband or in-laws did not have any rights to dowry. In those days educating a girl was not considered important and hence this money was gifted to be used in unfavourable situations. In case the girl got widowed or got trapped in a situation where she required money but had nobody to help her, she could use the dowry money. But with time husbands and their families started claiming this money as their right. The money once offered as a gift by the bride’s parents for the bride has now turned into a demand from the groom and his family making it the biggest pain for the girl’s parents. They are forced and threatened to fulfil dowry demands failing which the girl is physically and mentally abused. This includes beating the bride, confiscating her jewellery, and depriving her of basic needs like proper clothing. In some cases, this results in divorce and sometimes death. Because of increasing cruelty related to dowry, the Government of India passed a law in 1961 to eradicate it from society. According to this law, both accepting and offering dowry was declared as a punishable offense. People from every caste, creed, and religion must abide by this law. Hindus, Muslims, Catholics, Persians, Jews; every citizen is covered under this law. In some places, dowry in Muslims is called Salaami. In Mangalore, Catholics exchange dowry in the name of Kanyadaan. In a fast-developing state like Kerala, with a hundred percent literacy rate, many Catholic weddings stay on hold for years because of dowry. Even if the girl gets married without dowry, her parents go through a lot of difficulties created by the groom’s family. In some cases, either the groom divorces the girl, or the girl is forced to ask for a divorce.

Though dowry has been declared illegal, most people including the ones involved with the law, order, and politics do not care about this law. Lawyers, politicians, judges, doctors, engineers, and people at many other higher designations openly accept and offer dowry. It has become a status symbol and people take pride in it. The person who gets most affected by the dowry is the bride’s father. In some cases, he loses his entire life's savings for dowry and sometimes takes a huge loan. In case the dowry demands are not met, sometimes the groom leaves the wedding without thinking about the bride, and