Decades of sustained struggle for safeguarding the lives and the rights of girl children and women have led to the passage of important legislations. The Pre-Conception and Pre-Natal Diagnostic Techniques (Prohibition of Sex Selection) Act, 2003 is one such law. It seeks to prevent female foeticide by making it illegal to determine the sex of an unborn child or even use sex-selection technologies. But R.V. Asokan, the president of the Indian Medical Association, has now suggested that this law be scrapped as it has not done enough to improve the sex ratio at birth and has only made the lives of medical professionals unnecessarily difficult with legal nitty-gritty. India’s sex ratio had risen from 927 females per 1,000 males in 1991 to only 943 females per 1,000 males in 2011. It is also true that the law against pre-natal sex determination is flouted across the country. Moreover, while the law makes it mandatory for all ultrasound facilities to be registered and for medical practitioners to maintain records of every scan done on pregnant women, the monitoring of such facilities is poor. A ban on pre-natal sex determination can stop foeticide, but it has no impact on female infanticide. A 2020 report by the United Nations showed that 45.8 million girls in India fell prey to either foeticide or infanticide. Mr Asokan’s suggestion that legalising pre-natal sex determination would, in fact, help track the number of girls conceived, birthed, and then brought up into adulthood is not a new one either. But the problem — the same challenge stymies the current legislation against determining the baby’s gender before birth — lies in the implementation of a mechanism that would successfully monitor girl children from birth to adulthood in a populous country.

Deep-seated prejudices against girl children have not prevented female foeticide despite the criminalising of pre-natal sex determination. Legalising such a test would further imperil the lives of both the unborn girl child and the mother: reports by the National Inspection and Monitoring Committee have shown that while some women are abandoned by their families when they conceive girl children, other mothers expecting girls are killed off and their deaths written off as accidents. A number of laws — those against dowry and child marriages — and conditions — educational and economic emancipation of women — need to be realised before femicides — killing based on gender irrespective of age — can be stopped.