Infanticide in Multan

It is unlikely that the world will ever know what lay behind a live but injured newborn baby girl being thrown on to a rubbish tip in the Ghaziabad Colony area of Multan. The incident happened on September 30 and witnesses say the baby was thrown from the back of a car by a weeping woman and that another woman tried to conceal the child, or possibly bury it, whilst still alive. The women left as they had been seen, and despite the best efforts of Rescue 1122 staff, the baby died en route to Nishtar hospital. It is of note that the police took two hours to arrive on the scene, which speaks volumes about where they place female infanticide in their list of priorities.

Newborns are killed for a variety of reasons in Pakistan, and there is a marked upward trend of female infanticide nationally. Not all unwanted babies are killed, and Unicef, early in 2014, reported that more than 300 newborn baby girls are abandoned in Karachi alone every year. Female infanticide is most prevalent in the parts of countries that suffer persistent poverty and have poorly developed health infrastructures that facilitate family planning. There are two voluntary organisations that retrieve dead infants from urban environments in Pakistan, and both have ‘drop boxes’ for unwanted children, but these exist only in urban areas. Untold numbers of children live very brief lives in the countryside, there to be buried and forgotten. Poverty and ignorance are the engines that drive women in particular to kill their newborns, and male children are more likely to survive as they are considered an investment for the future, a pair of earning hands. The solution lies in education for all, because, goes the saying ‘Educate a boy and you educate an individual, but educate a girl and you educate an entire community’. There are going to be many more dead female babies in years to come; this is not a problem that is going away any time soon, and the tragedy in Multan, unfortunately, will be quickly forgotten.

 

Published in The Express Tribune, October 2^nd, 2014.

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