Indian minister calls for mandatory foetal gender tests

A day after Union Minister Maneka Gandhi suggested that sex determination test should be made compulsory to track women pregnant with a girl child, Health Minister J P Nadda on Tuesday said that it is not a Cabinet’s decision.

“What is even more outrageous is the fact that the BJP government wants to keep a track of all pregnant women in India from the time of conception of child up to the delivery”.

“In this country today, women are unsafe, girl child is unsafe and if by sex determination the information is registered whether the female foeticide can be stopped, this is her idea or imagination”.

India is among the countries with the worst child sex ratios in the world. According to the 2011 census, India had 943 women to every 1,000 men.

Parents and doctors can be jailed for up to five years for requesting or conducting a prenatal sex test, but they are still thought to be widespread, particularly in impoverished rural areas.

“My personal view is for a change in the present policy”.

“It is because there are unscrupulous practitioners in the medical community that the child sex ratio still does not show remarkable levels of improvement”, she said in a representation to Women and Child Development Minister Gandhi.

The minister added that this view was held by some stakeholders and she happened to mention it in the Regional Editor’s Conference in Jaipur yesterday to start a discussion on the matter.

“This is not a very productive idea. Such a system would help in ensuring that a foetus is not aborted only because it is a female”, the statement said.

“The Modi government must not pander to the interests of commercial interests at the expense of the girl child”.

A gynaecologist said mandatory disclosure would also make it hard for them to determine whether couples are opting for abortion because the pregnancy was a genuine unwanted pregnancy or because they want to abort a female foetus.

India’s overall sex ratio has improved over the past decades, but still continues to be skewed towards men.