(TargetLiberty.org) – A baby girl found in an Indian drain is doing well, doctors say. It’s a touching story, but highlights a huge problem in the world’s largest democracy.
On November 14, residents in Mumbai noticed a group of cats gathered around a city drain, making noise. Investigating, they found a five-day-old baby girl who had apparently been abandoned. Now, the girl has been released from the hospital and is doing well in a children’s shelter.
A baby girl who was only 5 days old when she was found in a drain in India's financial capital of Mumbai has been discharged from hospital. https://t.co/HLiPw9PBCB
— CNN International (@cnni) November 18, 2021
So far, police aren’t saying anything about how the baby ended up in the drain, but reports point out that it’s not uncommon for parents in India to abandon their baby girls. In Indian culture, parents prefer sons. Girls are seen as a financial burden, and poor families fear being left looking after daughters who can’t get married because the parents can’t pay a dowry.
Many pregnancies are terminated in illegal clinics that test for the unborn’s gender and abort baby girls. The result is births in India are heavily skewed towards boys – about 110 are born for every 100 girls. And, among families too poor to use the clinics, older traditions of abandoning or even killing newborn girls continue.
This story has a happy ending; the baby was rescued, cleaned and dried by cops, and cared for by doctors – but it nearly ended in tragedy. The baby couldn’t have survived much longer, Woman Constable Sheetal Sonawane told reporters that when she rescued the girl, she was already turning blue from the cold. Not every baby girl in India is that lucky – and many don’t even get the chance to be born.
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