Videos: Female Gendercide and Infanticide in India and China

Between India and China, 200 million girls have gone “missing” as parents abort female fetuses or kill and abandon baby girls. Several documentaries and reports cover this phenomenon, trying to explain the causes for this deadly gender discrimination and figure out what can be done about it.

Screenshot from the Trailer of It's a Girl

Screenshot from the Trailer of It's a Girl

With the tagline of “The three deadliest words in the world”, the “It's a Girl” documentary is one which through interviews and on-location filming is figuring out why 200 million girls are “missing” in India and China, and why there has been no effective actions to this problem.

Born to Die is another film investigating the rise in female feticide and infanticide in modern India.

Poh Si Teng for Global Post also has a video on the relationship between ultrasound devices, gender screening and female feticide, and whether the laws banning portable ultrasound will help stop the selective abortions in India:

The BBC's 2007 investigatory documentary on India's Missing Girls and people who are trying to turn the tide on a cultural phenomenon that affects all of India's socio-economic levels: the cult of boys, and the belief that girls are not worth the trouble to raise them. The documentary, split in 3 parts can be found online (1, 2, 3).

One of the organizations trying to make the difference is the Aarti Home in Kadapa, who take in abandoned children, most of whom are girls abandoned because they are girls, and also talking to expectant mothers of female children to encourage them to have and cherish them.

Aarti House hopes to be a home for girls who were already rejected once for being girls and make sure they have a safe haven. At the very beginning of this next video, a young girl talks about the disadvantages and hardships she went through just because she was a female:

World renowned Chinese-American novelist Anchee Min, who writes strong female characters admits in this next video how she didn't want to have a daughter, and all through her pregnancy, secretly hoped that it would turn out to be a boy, despite ultrasounds and tests because “Who wants to be a girl in China?”

Taiwanese Next Media Animation explores the consequences of the gender imbalance in China brought on by the One Child Policy and a society which values males more than females with the video and song No Girls Born (In China Anymore)

So there are no girls born, in China anymore
I feel so forlorn, with nobody to keep me warm
Confucian culture scorns daughters in favor of sons
So there are no girls born and I'm doomed to be just one

My parents chose me in utero to carry on the family name
But if I can't find a bride I'll be carrying nothing but shame
You gotta be tall, educated, and own your own house
miss one out of three, you won't find a spouse

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