Female foetuses dumped in sewer

Operator of Indian clinic hunted after death of woman

MUMBAI // Indian police have found 19 aborted female foetuses in a sewer, highlighting the country’s problem of female foeticide.

Prenatal sex tests are illegal in India, a policy designed to stop unborn girls being aborted by parents desperate for a boy.

But the tests are still thought to be common, particularly in poor rural areas, and sex ratios are skewed towards males.

“We have recovered 19 foetuses and are trying to arrest the doctor, who is absconding,” said Dattatray Shinde, a police superintendent in Sangli district of the western Maharashtra state. The foetuses were found on Sunday, wrapped in plastic bags in a sewer next to a clinic run by doctor Babasaheb Khidrapure in the village of Mhaisal.

Officers made the discovery after a 26-year-old woman died during a failed abortion attempt at the surgery, Mr Shinde said.

“We have arrested the victim’s husband Praveen Jamdade for pressuring her into an abortion,” he said. Parents and doctors can be jailed for up to five years for requesting or conducting a pre-natal sex test.

A 2011 study in the British medical journal The Lancet found that up to 12 million girls had been aborted in India over the past three decades.

India had 940 females for every 1,000 males, according to the last official census published in 2011, up from 933 in 2001.

In Sangli, where the foetuses were found, there are just 867 girls per 1000 boys, the figures show.

Women in India can face pressure to produce male children, who are seen as breadwinners. Girls are often viewed as a financial burden as they require hefty marriage dowries.