Save the Girl Child

The debate that has been going on for decades, the debate that has decided the fate of so many unborn children and worse still, so many young girls. A debate that has never seen the fair side of things and has always ruled out in the most unjustified manner, by telling a human being that you have no right to live just because you are a girl. Female foeticide and killing the girl child are practices that go back to centuries when they thought having a girl child leaves you indebted for life. The reasons were several, ranging from – a girl cannot go out and earn and is just another stomach to feed to a girl will eventually be have to be married off and we don’t have enough funds to give as dowry. This is when man decided that one should ideally kill a girl child rather than giving her a chance to do things differently.

Human beings have always sought convenience in everything they do and this convenience gets so deeply embedded that it starts seeming like the natural way of doing things. Killing the girl child was the easiest thing to do to save yourself from the wrath of the world and people chose it over everything else. And this is exactly why it has taken us hundreds of years to uplift the standard of women in the Indian society. Women have always been treated as somebody who isn’t required, but the truth cannot be further away from that, women are and will always be the bearer of life and the best companion anybody could ever get.

How to stop female foeticide

Every once in a while it may seem that we are developing as a nation, but there are several out of sight incidents that take place every day and take us back to exactly where we started from-

Beti Bachao – This needs to be done on a nationwide level without the exception of even a single house. Every house, every citizen of the country, every living being on the soil of India needs to know that having a daughter is not a curse. That girls are capable of changing the world and if you let them see the light of day, they can change your life too.

Exemplify Malala and others – Pakistan may be a smaller country, but it has done something that Indians have taken decades to do. Putting a daughter on the forefront for the world to admire and learn from is an act of courage and selflessness and we all must learn from it. We need to tell the Indians that having a girl as your child, in today’s world, is no different from having a boy and one needs to dismiss all the negative thoughts that they get when they hear that somebody has given birth to a baby girl.

Government initiatives – With all the activity that has been happening to uplift the status of women in the society, killing a girl should be a serious punishable offense and should not go unrecorded. We have already reached a point where the sex ratio is alarming and if things do not change nobody will be able to help the country.

A girl child is not just a part of a statistic that will determine the females per male in a given area. A girl touches and changes so many lives in her lifetime that this adorable gift of God should not be treated with so much cruelty. Killing anybody, a child or a grown up is a murder, is against humanity and one should never go easy on people who do not treat the girl child right.

Solutions

1. People who kill the girl child should be punished severely and the law should be made more strict so that the idea of female foeticide and killing the girl child goes out of the window.
2. Dowry has already been made illegal and this needs to be communicated to people who kills girls because of the fear of having to pay for their wedding.
3. Sex determination of the fetus is illegal and the person who does it should be punished and his practice should be discontinued permanently without any exception.
4. The mothers should be explained that killing their own child is not an option and that the fathers or families which drive them to do so should be boycotted. Educating the mother is like educating the whole family and this will help us save the girl child.