Armenians told to value women as abortions affect society

GAVAR: When Karina Aghalaryan discovered she was going to be the mother of a baby girl, the 35-yearold Armenian was ecstatic.

Her family was altogether more lukewarm.

Talk swiftly turned to what the baby clearly wasn’t: a boy.

When Petrosyan got pregnant with a second girl the following year, there were no celebrations. Instead, her mother- in- law marched her to the doctor for an abortion.

“My husband and my mother-inlaw forced me to figure out if it was a boy or a girl.

“When they found out it was a girl, they made me have an abortion,” said Aghalaryan, whose name was changed to avoid being stigmatised in her community.

“I had no words to say in that situation,” she said in Gavar, 100km from the Armenian capital, Yerevan.

For Armenian families, giving birth to at least one boy is a must, to continue the family line and carry forward the surname in a society where daughters often marry and move away.

As the economy worsens – nearly a third of the country lives below the poverty line – Armenians see sons as a way to ensure financial stability in old age but aborting girls is causing a potential shortage of women that authorities want to address.

“People think that for a boy it’s easier to earn money and become more economically sustainable than a girl,” said Armine Hovakimyan, president of the Goris Women’s Resource Centre.

“That has a very big impact especially in remote areas, they want to have boys more than girls.”

Typical of many Armenian towns, Gavar is a ramshackle, industrial city in decline.

Its Soviet-era factories have faded along with the rest of a once-robust economy, which stalled when the small Caucasian country won independence in 1991.

Some new industries are taking root, seeking to replace the old, highly centralised economy, but unemployment remains high.

Because of the high numbers of unemployed women, and a widespread belief that women should stay home and take care of family, Armenian women on average earn half of what the men do.

Therefore, women who get pregnant with girls face a dilemma: giving birth to enough children that one of them will end up being a boy – or having abortions until one of them is male.

Worldwide, biologically 102 to 106 boys are born for every 100 girls on average, according to the United Nations.

In 2012-2013, 114 boys were born in Armenia for every 100 girls, according to the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) – this is the third highest sex-selective abortion rate in the world after China and neighbouring Azerbaijan.

As a result, UNFPA estimates that in Armenia, nearly 93,000 women will be missing by 2060 if the country’s high prenatal sex selection rate remains unchanged, driving young, single men to leave the country in search of a partner. — Reuters