The oleander plant yields a bright, pleasant flower, but also a milky sap that, if ingested, can be a deadly poison. It's one of the methods families use to kill newborn girls in the Salem District of Tamil Nadu, a part of India notorious for female infanticide.
Though the government has battled the practice for decades, India's gender imbalance has worsened in recent years. Any progress toward halting infanticide, it seems, has been offset by a rise in sex-selective abortions. Too many couples - aided by medical technology, unethical doctors, and weak enforcement of laws banning abortion on the basis of gender - are electing to end a pregnancy if the fetus is female.
I understand there is societal pressure to do this but I just can't fathom it. Then the question becomes how to stop it.
"The only way to wipe out this evil is by an attitudinal shift," says CSG's Mr. Prasad. "Educate a girl beyond eighth grade and encourage her to find her voice."
If they are never born, how do you start this attitudinal shift? What we do to ourselves sometimes is strange.
Custom, then, is the great guide of human life. David Hume
