Original subtitles

This Indian woman has killed eight of her baby girls.

She would get pregnant in the hopes of having a son.

But each time she'd deliver a daughter instead;

and each time she'd kill the baby because she did not want a daughter.

She wanted a son.

Sadly, this woman's story is not unique.

In many nations, particularly India and China,

the three most dangerous words heard at the birth of a child are:

"It's a Girl."

Around the world, the average gender ratio

is 105 boys for every 100 girls born.

But in certain regions in India and China,

that ratio is as high as 140 boys to every 100 girls.

And each year, that ratio skews more and more toward boys

as fewer and fewer girls are born.

What is causing this tremendous shift

in the two most populated nations on earth?

In India and China, most families prefer sons to daughters.

Their cultures and traditions have instilled in them a belief

that sons bring strength, blessing and wealth to the family.

Daughters do not.

In fact, daughters in these cultures

are typically considered drains on families and their resources.

For instance, in India, a daughter's family

is usually expected to pay an expensive dowry

of property and money to the husband's family.

Families with sons gain wealth and daughters-in-law.

Families with daughters lose both their wealth to dowry,

and their daughters.

This cultural preference for sons has led many families

to rid themselves of female children.

Baby girls are frequently aborted,

killed immediately after birth,

or abandoned.

Those daughters that do live, though,

often become victims of neglect and abuse.

This mass extermination of female children --

this gendercide --

is the direct result of cultures

which place a high value on the lives of boys

and a low value on the lives of girls.

Glory Dass runs several orphanages in Southern India.

Many of the girls in his homes were abandoned by families

who did not want daughters.

This is an entire system, a social machinery, that says,

"We don't want females."

The killing of females is actually systemic.

That...it is not just before birth,

but it's also after birth, and different stages of birth.

There's a huge amount of female infanticide.

Girls under the age of five, five and under,

have a very high mortality rate.

Either they don't get food,

or if they're sick, they don't want to spend on medicine.

It is negligent homicide.

They are just allowed to die,

in a way that boys are not allowed to die.

In India today, the devaluation of women and girls is widespread.

Because of factors like female feticide, female infanticide,

abuse and neglect,

one out of four girls does not live past puberty.

The mortality rates for girls between the ages of one and five

are 40% higher than those of boys.

According to one UN estimate,

there are up to 200 million missing women

in the world today due to gendercide.

We just came down to Haryana to one of our projects

to have a meeting with the local community here.

This was arranged by our Field Coordinator.

And in this meeting we discussed various topics

of female feticide, of dowry,

of equality of girl child and boy child.

All the women said that boys and girls are equal,

and we don't have anything against girls and boys,

it's more our men who force us to have a male child.

Although there was a hidden tone

in which everybody said that once you have a girl child,

please do not kill them,

and it's completely incorrect to do infanticide.

But, on the other hand,

they were also talking about not to have a girl child.

So in a hidden tone, they were supporting female feticide,

and commenting about, once you have a child,

then you should not kill them.

But your first child - and everybody had the same answer -

has to be a boy.

Because you wish for a boy,

as he will make sure your family lineage continues.

He'll make sure the property of the family remains in the family,

and he'll make sure the daughters, his sisters,

will be in safe hands.

In India, as girls grow up into women,

their plight does not improve.

More than 100,000 are murdered each year

because they fail to produce sons

or because their new husbands or in-laws

are not satisfied with the dowry they've received.

In 1961, the Indian government outlawed dowry

to prevent such crimes,

yet the practice still remains common today.

And a majority of dowry-related crimes

are never investigated or prosecuted.

Maya and Raju had four children - all of them daughters.

As their eldest daughter, Latika, got older,

her parents worried she wouldn't find a man to marry.

After the man agreed to marry Latika,

Maya and Raju collected what they could

to put together as a dowry.

And so Latika and the man were married.

Soon Latika got pregnant and gave birth to a baby girl.

This made Latika happy, but upset her husband.

Latika's husband frequently drank too much

and would abuse her.

Latika though, not wanting to worry her parents,

didn't tell them about the abuse.

Then, one day, Maya and Raju received word

that Latika was in the hospital.

By the time Maya and Raju made it to the hospital,

it was too late.

Latika was dead.

Latika's husband had claimed she had hung herself.

But Maya and Raju didn't believe him.

The police arrested Latika's husband for the killing of his wife

in what is known as a dowry death.

But after a few weeks, they let him go.

In India, courts frequently ignore dowry deaths

and other crimes against women.

Now Maya and Raju worry about Latika's baby girl -

their granddaughter.

They worry for her safety,

living with the man who killed Latika.

Homes where there is tremendous violence inflicted on women,

are the same homes where violence

is killing girls of five and under at an abnormal rate.

So it is like the female becomes one of the inadvertent pawns

in this resource exchange, in a patriarchy.

So you can buy her, sell her, keep her or kill her,

however you want.

It's like with any resource,

so that is the complete dehumanization of females.

Dowry and infanticide and feticide go hand in hand.

The minute dowry enters a community

everyone becomes greedy for dowry.

They think this is another way of getting huge amounts of money.

And they demand huge amounts in dowry.

And if they're entitled to get dowry,

then they have to give dowry as well.

So that becomes reason not to have girls and daughters.

And so that doesn't matter whether you are very poor,

or you're very rich in India.

That same logic applies.

If you're very rich,

you're getting foreign BMW's and Mercedes in dowry,

but you have to give that also in dowry.

So the logic for why feticide and infanticide

are occurring today are actually more...

It is really greed-based.

It is not based on economic necessity.

It is greed-based,

it's every son is one way of getting money in,

and every daughter less

is less outflow of money from within a family.

Poor families who want to avoid paying expensive dowries

frequently kill or abandon their newborn daughters.

Wealthier families use ultrasound machines

to learn the gender of the child;

then, if the child is a girl, commit female feticide,

aborting their baby because of her gender.

Mitu's husband and his mother

demanded Mitu get an illegal sex determination test

because they feared the twins would be girls.

When Mitu refused, they locked her in her room.

Knowing Mitu was allergic to eggs,

her husband and his mother

baked a cake made with eggs and fed it to her.

When Mitu became ill, she had to be taken to the hospital.

There, Mitu's husband and his mother

convinced the doctor to secretly perform an ultrasound.

When the doctor did, the ultrasound revealed

that Mitu's twins were both girls.

The demands for abortion intensified.

In a fit of rage, Mitu's husband pushed her down the stairs.

Then, she was locked in a room - injured and bleeding -

in hopes she would miscarry.

But Mitu was determined to have her daughters.

She escaped to her parent's house.

Eventually, she gave birth to her twin daughters,

though two months premature.

In order to curb the growing practice of female feticide, India passed

the Preconception and Prenatal Diagnostic Techniques Act in 1994.

The PCPNDT act made it illegal

for a doctor to determine a fetus' gender

and for parents to abort a child because she is a girl.

According to the PCPNDT, doctors with ultrasound machines

must be registered and are required to report

whenever they perform an ultrasound and for what reason.

But many doctors ignore the law.

Families pay these doctors under the table

to discover the gender of their child,

in order to abort the fetus if it is a girl.

And though such practices are illegal,

the government rarely investigates instances when the law is broken.

As a result, sex-selective abortion continues to be common in India.

You will hardly hear of any cases where it has been enforced in any state,

and there is absolutely no accountability from the top to the bottom.

Today, Mitu continues to plead with the government to prosecute

her husband, who forced her to get the illegal ultrasound

as well as the doctor who performed it.

Doctors make large sums of money

for performing such ultrasounds, though.

And the courts favor doctors and hospitals in such cases.

This fight has been going on for years.

The female gendercide prevalent in India

is also widespread in its neighbor China.

Like India, China is a patriarchal nation

with a strong son-preference culture.

But the Chinese government has created a policy,

which ultimately encourages gendercide.

In response to fears of overpopulation,

China introduced the One-Child Policy in 1979.

The law restricts most Chinese couples to one child.

Rural families, though, are allowed a second child

if their first is a daughter...

so they can try for a son.

Enforcement of the policy is strict and harsh.

Families found in violation of the policy

may be subject to forced abortion or forced sterilization.

Li and her husband lived in a rural village

with their two daughters.

They were allowed two children

because their first child was a girl.

But their families desperately wanted them to have a son.

So, though it was against the law,

Li and her husband decided to have a third child,

in the hopes that it would be a boy.

When they found out that they would be having another girl,

their parents told themto get rid of the baby.

Another daughter would do them no good.

But Li and her husband wanted to keep their child.

In China there is a system of paid informants,

where women who are illegally pregnant

can be informed on by their neighbors,

their friends, their co-workers, their supervisors...

just walking down the street and looking a little bit bigger.

These are paid informants.

So then, the family planning office

keeps track of all these women who are illegally pregnant

and then they will have a family planning raid

on their neighborhood,

where they will do a sweep of that particular neighborhood

and just drag out all the women who are illegally pregnant

and bring them down to the family planning office

and force them all to have abortions.

The Chinese One-Child policy

is enforced by the Family Planning Police,

a militant order that monitors and arrests families

in violation of the policy.

The Family Planning Police heard Li was pregnant with her third child,

so they forced their way into her home.

To save the life of their baby girl,

Li and her husband went into hiding.

Eventually, Li gave birth to their daughter.

But because their child was born illegally,

they had to remain hidden.

So they fled again.

This time to a distant region,

leaving behind their three daughters with different relatives.

Today, Li and her husband workn a distant, far-off factory,

earning what they can to send home to provide for their daughters.

They miss their children, but they also understand

that if they were to return to their village,

they would be arrested and severely punished

by the Family Planning Police.

The One-Child Policy was enforced

through financial punishment on parents.

Now, during the 80s these financial punishments

implied that parents were denied some of their income

to the tune of 10% of income from both parents for 14 years

until the child reached 15 years old.

And in recent years, the One-Child Policy punishments

have become even more severe...

Two to three years of family income

for parents to have at least one kid.

Some of these parents have decided to have a kid

in spite of the policy.

But for many parents, they were forced to choose

between a financial punishment they could not afford,

or not having a son,

which is something they also couldn't deal with.

And so for those parents, they were choosing

between financial ruin or engaging in sex-selective abortion.

In China, a new population of illegal children are emerging.

These children have no official existence;

they are ineligible for education and health care.

And when they grow up,

they can not officially be married, own land, or hold a job.

They have no future in China.

According to the World Health Organization,

500 women a day kill themselves in China

and countless more attempt it.

China has the highest female suicide rate

of any country in the world.

Could this epidemic of female suicide in China

be related to forced abortion, forced sterilization,

and female infanticide?

How does a woman feel about herself as a woman

if she has killed her daughter just because she's a girl?

How does that make her feel about herself?

How does that make her feel about her own right to live,

to draw breath on this earth?

Right now, we're on the cusp of an explosion in the sex ratio

amongst the sexually mature population age groups.

So Chinese marriage markets are on the verge of collapse.

These bare branches are a growing problem.

Each year, 1.1 million more boys are born than girls in China.

And currently there are 37 million more men than women.

That means there are 37 million fewer women for men to marry.

As finding a woman to marry

becomes more and more difficult for men,

child trafficking has increased dramatically.

Girls are stolen or purchased by families

so they can be secured as future brides for their sons.

They searched the surrounding villages,

handing out fliers with their daughter's picture.

For months there was no sign of her,

and the longer she was gone, the more her parents worried.

Then someone in another village

said she had seen a child looking like the little girl

living in a nearby home.

The parents went with the police

to the home the caller had reported.

Inside, they found their daughter, healthy and unharmed.

The police arrested the residents who had kidnapped her.

The couple is believed to have stolen the little girl

to provide a future bride for their son.

It's estimated that there are approximately

70,000 children every year that are stolen away from their parents

and trafficked to other parents,

who have not been able to have a second child

through the birth process,

so they want to traffic a child into their families.

Most families want brides for their sons,

but few families want daughters for themselves.

Because of this, hundreds of thousands of baby girls

are orphaned or abandoned in China each year.

Some people would regard allowing two children

instead of one child

as being a solution to the One-Child policy.

That is not a solution.

The issue is not how many children

the government allows a woman to have.

The issue is the coercion with which they enforce the number.

So whether it's one child or two children,

a woman is still going to have to have a pregnancy permit,

and a birth permit to have that child.

Whether it's their first child or their second child,

or they may be subject to forced abortion.

Just reversing the One-Child policy will only mitigate the problem,

but the long-term solution is for some parents

to be okay with not having a son.

Son preference comes from cultures that devalue women.

They feel that women are just not as good as men.

And women have been beaten down by these cultures;

and these cultures have been devaluing women for thousands of years,

can't always stand up for themselves.

And that's why women who come from cultures that value women,

where women are equal,

we need to stand up for our sisters

because they cannot stand up for themselves.

It is a violation of human rights

when babies are denied food or drowned or suffocated

or their spines broken simply because they are born girls.

It is a violation of human rights

when women are doused with gasoline,

set on fire and burned to death

because their marriage dowries are deemed too small.

It is a violation of human rights

when women are denied the right to plan their own families;

and that includes being forced to have abortions

or being sterilized against their will.

If there is one message that echoes forth from this conference,

let it be that human rights are women's rights

and women's rights are human rights -

once and for all.

Sadly, since this address in 1995,

very little has been done either socially or politically

to stop gendercide around the world.

The right to life is what defines us as humans.

That as a human being your most fundamental right

is the right to life and existence.

And it's unconditional;

you don't ever justify why someone has the right to live,

like we do now with women.

So there are sites that say,

oh, but if you kill women, who will have the babies?

Well, like I said before, that I've argued -

does that mean that you kill women who don't want to have babies?

Women are so beautiful, why do you want to kill them?

Well, if they are ugly do you then kill them?

The right to life is an uncontested right.

But the fact that we have to justify why women shouldn't be killed -

that is a dehumanizing argument in itself.

So I think that... somewhere there has been a huge shift

in the female genocide from the human's rights basis.

So we are treating women like pandas

or any other wildlife animal that is going extinct

and that we should raise for the conservation.

So when you say something,

like you show a picture of a little girl

and you say save the girl child

and you have many people say, yes, save the girl child,

who are we addressing?

Who are we talking to?

Who is going to save the girl child

and whom are you going to save the girl child from?

You do not get to this scale without much of the population

being involved in some way.

Either it's happening in the families in terms of feticide,

dowry violence,

or they're involved in the police or courts,

or their turning a blind eye

when it happens in their neighbors house

or their neighborhood.

Everybody is involved, perpetuating a system,

turning a blind eye, aligning for it to continue.

So it is when you say. "Save the girl child,"

nobody is listening. Who's listening?

When you turn the mirror around

and unless we take a good, hard look into our psyche,

into our moral conscience and you realize that as a nation

we have need for examination, for shame and for change,

for actually confronting it within ourselves,

nothing is going to change.

There needs to be an assumption of responsibility,

that there is something that we have allowed to go horribly wrong

and we are each responsible for it.