This is from 1993, but...
Quote:
THE BURDEN OF WOMANHOOD: THIRD WORLD, SECOND CLASS
Washington Post , April 25, 1993
By JOHN WARD ANDERSON AND MOLLY MOORE
When Rani returned home from the hospital cradling her newborn daughter, the men in the family slipped out of her mud hut while she and her mother-in- law mashed poisonous oleander seeds into a dollop of oil and forced it down the infant's throat.
As soon as darkness fell, Rani crept into a nearby field and buried her baby girl in a shallow, unmarked grave next to a small stream.
``I never felt any sorrow,'' Rani, a farm laborer with a weather-beaten face, said through an interpreter. ``There was a lot of bitterness in my heart toward the baby because the gods should have given me a son.''
Each year hundreds and perhaps thousands of newborn girls in India are murdered by their mothers simply because they are female. Some women believe that sacrificing a daughter guarantees a son in the next pregnancy. In other cases, the family cannot afford the dowry that would eventually be demanded for a girl's marriage.
And for many mothers, sentencing a daughter to death is better than condemning her to life as a woman in the Third World, with cradle-to-grave discrimination, poverty, sickness and drudgery...
... A woman's greatest challenge is an elemental one: simply surviving through a normal life cycle. In South Asia and China, the perils begin at birth, with the threat of infanticide.
Like many rural Indian women, Rani, now 31, believed that killing her daughter 3 1/2 years ago would guarantee that her next baby would be a boy. Instead, she had another daughter.
``I wanted to kill this child also,'' she said, brushing strands of hair from the face of the 2-year-old girl she named Asha, or Hope. ``But my husband got scared because all these social workers came and said, `Give us the child.' `` Ultimately, Rani was allowed to keep her.
She paused. ``Now I have killed, and I still haven't had any sons.'' Amravati, who lives in a village near Rani in the Indian state of Tamil Nadu, said she killed two of her own day-old daughters by pouring scalding chicken soup down their throats, one of the most widely practiced methods of infanticide in southern India. She showed where she buried their bodies -- under piles of cow dung in the tiny courtyard of her home.
``My mother-in-law and father-in-law are bedridden,'' said Amravati, who has two living daughters. ``I have no land and no salary, and my husband met with an accident and can't work. Of course it was the right decision. I need a boy. Even though I have to buy clothes and food for a son, he will grow on his own and take care of himself. I don't have to buy him jewelry or give him a 10,000-rupee ($350) dowry.''
I remember still hearing about stories like this recently.
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