Female foeticide and Infanticide issues

Development processes have had an adverse impact on Indian women in correlation with increasing instances of femicide. The term, femicide, refers to all three cases of female feticide, infanticide, and the death of a girl child based on neglect. Various areas of India were historically infamous for committing female infanticide, but this had begun to decrease over time. Nonetheless, several forms of development have ensured that sex-selection technologies are accessible to a larger proportion of the population, which has led to a gender imbalance. These technologies have also produced mixed results for women’s health. The birth ratio of males heavily outnumbers that of females in many regions of India. On the other hand, several development initiatives have increased female literacy and independence, yet this “progress” appears to be increasing the abortion of female fetuses. Thus, we argue that femicide remains a problem in India because development processes and medical advancements have failed to alter social perceptions about women and overlooked the social, economic, and legal context that continues to marginalize women. This paper will first examine the socioeconomic factors that have historically subordinated women and demonstrate how they continue to have an influence today. Second, it will describe how development has diversely affected Indian women and their health based on class. Finally, this paper will explain why legal policies discouraging femicide have failed. Overall, it provides an analysis of the implications that efforts to control women’s bodies and reproduction have had on women’s health in India.

The present contribution reassesses the main aspects of the epigraphic sources found in the so-called tophet in order to demonstrate how they are significant and how they undermine the funerary interpretations of these precincts. The inscriptions decisively define the tophet as a place of worship, a sanctuary where sacrifices were made to specific deities in specific rites. The epigraphic evidence combined with literary and archaeological data show how these sacrifices consisted of infants and small animals (either as substitutes or interred together), sometimes commemorated by the inscriptions themselves.