WATERING THE NEIGHBOUR'S GARDEN: THE GROWING - CICRED

DISCRIMINATION FROM CONCEPTION TO CHILDHOOD…
behaviour and sex preferences. Education, work participation, and
exposure to mass media are some of the means by which women gains
status and autonomy. It has often been argued that women’s status is
an indicator of the level of development of a given society. Women’s
autonomy is likely to have a significant impact on demographic and
health seeking behaviour of couples by altering women’s relative control
over fertility and contraception as well as influencing their attitudes
and abilities (Sen and Batliwala, 1997). In the above perspective, the
present study tries to investigate sex-selective discrimination in terms
of active and passive elimination of a girl child through life-cycle approach.
The specific purpose of the study is to examine female child
neglect leading to death (passive elimination) and selective abortion
(active elimination) according to childhood experiences, autonomy
status and marital instability of the mothers.
2. Methodology
2.1. Data and methods
The work presented here is based on a follow-up study of a community-based
research project carried out by the International Institute
for Population Sciences (IIPS), Mumbai, in the Jind district of Haryana
in 2000-2002 (Unisa et al., 2003). This district showed a very high child
sex ratio in 1991 including many villages with sex ratio of 125 boys per
100 girls and above. From this cluster of villages with especially high
child sex ratio, five localities were selected randomly. A complete
enumeration of all the households was conducted: a total of 2,590
households were covered in the study and around 2,646 ever-married
women in the reproductive age were interviewed. Additional information
was collected on household characteristics, pregnancy histories,
antenatal care use and obstetric morbidity for each pregnancy. Detailed
analysis from this study shows the frequency of sex-selective abortions
(Unisa et al., 2007). As the objective of the study was firstly to examine
the magnitude of these abortions, information on childhood experiences,
marital stability and autonomy was not collected in the initial
IIPS study. A follow-up study was carried out to examine the factors
responsible for sex-selective abortions (Agrawal, 2004). For this purpose,
we identified a subset of women who had experienced pregnancy
after 1995. Overall, there were 1,329 women who had given birth after
1995 in the selected five villages. A sample of 418 women was drawn
from the subset with any of the following characteristics: women
whose first two births were female or women whose first child was a
girl and had experienced either an abortion or female child death. It
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