Rupee Baby

An infant girl was left in a plastic bag in the town temple this week. Such a thing is hardly anything new or specific onto India and is, perhaps, not even a tragic event onto itself (assuming the child is found safely).

The difference in India, of course, is the gender of the infant that is often left.

India, with one of the worst sex ratios in the world - only 914 females to every 1,000 males. An appalling statistic. In that it shows just how many females are missing.

I asked the teachers why they thought that girls were more often left than boys. Priyanka responded in her soft, yet articulate way that when a family has a girl they only see her as a cost. They must pay to raise her, to educate her and, finally, they must provide her a dowry before she is married. And than she leaves the family. She doesn't care for them in their old age, like sons will. Therefore, she is thought of as only an expense.

A fixed rupee sign placed on the face of a girl. The value of a person determined solely on the basis of a gender.

When I asked Priyanka if she thought the gender imbalance would change if dowry's were abolished, she whispered softly "it would lessen."

Driving home from work that day, I was reminded of an opinion piece I wrote my local newspaper when I was 14 years old. After it was published,  my father proudly framed it and the gradually yellowing clipping continues to be displayed on top of the living room piano to this day. In it, I responded to an article written concerning the trial of a girl my age who had left her newborn baby in a dumpster and the child had not survived. She was being tried as a juvenile and facing numerous charges. I don't know what happened to that trial. Likely caught up in my own blossoming teenage life, I never kept track of the story.

For that girl, the issue was not that she had given birth to a girl. It was that she had simply given birth. Here, half a world away in a suburb of one of the largest cities in a "modern" India, daughters are abandoned not because they born. But because of what they are. Not male. But female. And, therefore, valued less.