[Congressional Record Volume 159, Number 122 (Tuesday, September 17, 2013)]
[Extensions of Remarks]
[Pages E1324-E1325]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                         INDIA'S MISSING GIRLS

                                 ______
                                 

                       HON. CHRISTOPHER H. SMITH

                             of new jersey

                    in the house of representatives

                      Tuesday, September 17, 2013

  Mr. SMITH of New Jersey. Mr. Speaker, a hearing that my subcommittee 
held last week examined the problem of ``India's Missing Girls.'' While 
for most of us today our attention was drawn to the unfolding crisis in 
Syria--I was on C-SPAN's Washington Journal Program call-in program and 
introduced a resolution calling for establishing a Syrian War Crimes 
Tribunal--other atrocities continue unabated around the world. We 
cannot ignore these atrocities, among the most egregious of which is 
violation of the human rights of the girl child and women in India.
   Women in India are confronted with a compounding crisis. By most 
estimates, there are tens of millions of women missing in India due to 
the devaluing of female life beginning in the womb.
   Sex-selective abortion and female infanticide have led to lopsided 
sex ratios. In parts of India, for example, 126 boys are born for every 
100 girls. This in turn leads to a shortage of marriageable women, 
which then leads to trafficking in persons, bride selling and 
prostitution.
   Perhaps the best figures we have concerning the magnitude of the 
problem come from India's 2011 census figures, which find that there 
are approximately 37 million more men than women in India.
   Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh has addressed this issue head 
on, stating ``the falling child sex ratio is an indictment of our 
social values. Improving this ratio is not merely a question of 
stricter compliance with the existing laws. What is more important is 
how we view and value the girl child in our society . . . It is a 
national shame for us that despite this, female feticide and 
infanticide continue in many parts of our country.''
   Even when they are not killed outright either in the womb or just 
after birth, this bias against girl children manifests itself in 
situations where family resources are limited and little food is 
available, in boys being fed before girls, leading to greater incidents 
of malnutrition among girls and a mortality rate that is 75% higher for 
girls below age 5 than for boys.
   The desire for a male child can be so great that there is a trend 
towards sex change operations for girls between ages 1 to 5, a process 
known as ``genitoplasty.'' Each year, hundreds of girls reportedly are 
pumped with hormones and surgically altered to turn them into facsimile 
boys. India's National Commission for Protection of Child Rights has 
correctly stated that this ``highly unethical'' procedure is a 
violation of children's rights as well as a ``perpetuation of the age 
old preferences for boys and biases against the girl child.''
   But the roots of the present problem lie not only with cultural 
factors, but also misbegotten policy decisions--including population 
control policies that were hatched in the United States--which have had 
a disproportionately negative impact on India's women.
   We learned from our witnesses that this includes policies advanced 
by the United States Agency for International Development, or USAID, 
and funded by foundations such as

[[Page E1325]]

the Ford Foundation and the Rockefeller Foundation, and abetted by non-
governmental organizations such as the Population Council and the 
International Planned Parenthood Federation.
   During the debate in the U.S. House of Representatives on a bill to 
ban sex selective abortion, I noted that for most of us, ``it's a 
girl'' is cause for enormous joy, happiness and celebration. But in 
many countries--including our own--it can be a death sentence. Today, 
the three most dangerous words in China and India are: it's a girl. We 
can't let that happen here.
   Our witness today, Dr. Matthew Connelly, in his book Fatal 
Misconception: The Struggle to Control World Population traces the 
sordid history of sex-selection abortion as a means of population 
control. In her book, Unnatural Selection: Choosing Boys Over Girls, 
and the Consequences of a World Full of Men, Mara Hvistendahl, 
elaborates ``[b]y August 1969, when the National Institute of Child 
Health and Human Development and the Population Council convened 
another workshop on population control, sex selection had become a pet 
scheme . . . Sex selection, moreover, had the added advantage of 
reducing the number of potential mothers . . . if a reliable sex 
determination technology could be made available to a mass market,'' 
there was ``rough consensus'' that sex selection abortion ``would be an 
effective, uncontroversial and ethical way of reducing the global 
population.''
   Fewer women, fewer mothers, fewer future children.
   At the conference, one abortion zealot, Christopher Tietze co-
presented sex selection abortion as one of twelve new strategies 
representing the future of global birth control. Planned Parenthood 
honored Tietze four years later with the Margaret Sanger Award.
   Hvistendahl writes that today ``there are over 160 million females 
'missing' from Asia's population. That's more than the entire female 
population of the United States. And gender imbalance--which is mainly 
the result of sex selective abortion--is no longer strictly an Asian 
problem. In Azerbaijan and Armenia, in Eastern Europe, and even among 
some groups in the United States, couples are making sure at least one 
of their children is a son. So many parents now select for boys that 
they have skewed the sex ratio at birth of the entire world.''
   In the Global War Against Baby Girls renowned AEI demographer 
Nicholas Eberstadt wrote in The New Atlantis; ``over the past three 
decades the world has come to witness an ominous and entirely new form 
of gender discrimination: sex-selective feticide, implemented through 
the practice of surgical abortion with the assistance of information 
gained through prenatal gender determination technology. All around the 
world, the victims of this new practice are overwhelmingly female--in 
fact, almost universally female. The practice has become so ruthlessly 
routine in many contemporary societies that it has impacted their very 
population structures, warping the balance between male and female 
births and consequently skewing the sex ratios for the rising 
generation toward a biologically unnatural excess of males.''
   Many European nations including the UK as well as several Asian 
countries ban sex selection abortion. Only four US states--Arizona, 
Illinois, Oklahoma, and Pennsylvania--proscribe it.
   Sex-selection abortion is cruel and discriminatory and legal. It is 
violence against women. Most people in and out of government remain 
woefully unaware of the fact that sex-selection abortion was--a 
violent, nefarious and deliberate policy imposed on the world by the 
pro-abortion population control movement--it's not an accident. The 
Congress can--and must--defend women from this vicious assault today.
   While India has taken steps to curb these practices, passing laws to 
ban sex selective abortion and temper cultural facts such as the need 
for brides to provide a high dowry that contribute to parents looking 
at their daughters as a liability, these laws are irregularly enforced. 
Moreover, there are laws at the state level which exacerbate the 
problem, mandating that parents only have two children, penalizing 
those who exceed this number and denying benefits. This leads 
inevitably to sex-selective abortion and, particularly in poorer areas, 
female infanticide, as parents will opt to have a son over a daughter, 
especially when their first child is a daughter.
   We hope that this hearing will better understand how we can play a 
role in curbing such horrific abuses.
   What, for example, can we do to help ensure that companies based in 
the US, such as General Electric, whose ultrasound equipment is used to 
determine the sex of the child in utero, take steps to prevent what 
should be a tool to promote life of both mother and child from being 
used as an instrument of death?
   Given the past role of US agencies such as USAID in coercive 
population control policies, what oversight do we need to conduct to 
make sure such abuses do not creep their way into existing programs?
   Similarly, to what extent are organizations that receive funding 
from the United States government implicated in such practices?
   What role can our State Department play, beyond compiling 
information regarding what is occurring in India with respect to what 
some have labeled ``gendercide,'' to influence positively the Indian 
government, so that it reforms laws and policies that exacerbate skewed 
sex ratios, such as two-child laws?
   By shining a light on what is happening in India with its missing 
girls, we hope to move toward a world where every woman is valued and 
respected because of her intrinsic dignity, and where every child is 
welcomed regardless of his or her sex.

                          ____________________