Infant Girls In India Subjected To Sex Change Operations

It’s true that I always dreamed of having a baby girl, and I was so thankful when I was told my oldest child had two XX chromosomes. But it’s also true that I was raised to appreciate boys and girls. I can honestly state my parents showed no preference for one over the other. We were encouraged to embrace our sex, but that didn’t mean I couldn’t go fishing with my dad (which I did all the time) or that my brother was anything other than praised for his musical and artistic abilities.

Now that I have two little girls, I’ve come to appreciate them as girls and think about how to encourage them as girls. I imagine it’s not too much different from what it’s like raising boys — basically you just value them as they are. Sadly, though, there’s evidence that little girls are unwanted throughout the world. And parents are abdicating their responsibilities toward their children in frightening new ways. We’ve seen lots of coverage of the 160 abortions performed simply because of the sex of the child, that sex being female.

And now we have reports out of India that girls as young as one year old are being butchered and forced into sex change operations by parents who don’t value them as girls. This is a heartbreaking story and the cultural forces in play here are, admittedly, complex. But what can be done?

Hindustan Times reports that surgeons in Indore are performing genitoplasty on hundreds of little girls a year. These little girls then have to be pumped full of hormone drugs to complete the sex change.

This shocking, unprecedented trend, catering to the fetish for a son, is unfolding at conservative Indore’s well-known clinics and hospitals on children who are 1-5 years old. The process being used to ‘produce’ a male child from a female is known as genitoplasty.

It’s interesting to me that parents would press for these surgeries even with the knowledge that their sex-changed children won’t be able to procreate. India apparently has limited or no laws to protect children from such unwarranted surgeries.

Either way, it’s the culture that needs to change. Little girls and boys are both a wonderful blessing and I wish these parents in India could see that.