AP Features, July 23rd, 2007
Dozens of plastic bags stuffed with skulls and body parts that police believe are from female fetuses aborted or newborn girls killed because their families wanted boys have been found in an abandoned well in eastern India, authorities said Monday.
Investigators suspect a nearby medical clinic performed the abortions and possibly killed infants at the parents' request because they were female, although authorities have yet to conclusively determine the sex of the babies, said Yogesh Bahadur Khurania, a senior police official in the state of Orissa, on India's eastern coast.
He said police were also still trying to figure out how many babies had been dumped in the well near the Krishna Clinic. But the CNN-IBN television news channel said authorities in Orissa believed as many as 37 bodies of infant girls had been found.
Khurania said the owner of the clinic, Sabita Sahu, and the manager, Shyma Sahu, have been detained for questioning.
He said police suspect the clinic in Nayagarh, roughly 90 kilometers (56 miles) west of Bhubaneswar, was determining the sex of fetuses _ a practice that is illegal in India but remains widespread.
Many Indian families see daughters as a liability because of a tradition requiring a bride's family to pay the groom's family a large dowry of cash and gifts. Girls often don't receive the same education as boys and many don't get adequate medical treatment.
Last year, an international team of researchers estimated that up to 10 million female fetuses had been aborted in the past 10 in years in India, a country of about 1.1 billion people.
The result is a gender ratio increasingly skewed in favor of men _ there were 927 women for every 1,000 men, according to the 2001 census, down from 945 women per 1,000 men in 1991.
