I can't seem to view Yahoo Videos, Faust, although I think I know what you're trying to show me. That's no surprise to me.
Here's a different link, though with the same idea (from ActionAid UK).
Looking at it again I'm actually glad I live in a much more privileged, blissful and educated culture where these cases are incredibly minimal. Most of the sex selection cases are, unsurprisingly, the direct consequences of Dowry. This situation usually drives families into desperation, especially in orthodox and poorer areas, and they end up abandoning girls entirely. A gender which gets them more "profit" is considered a fortune. However, while dowry has been outlawed the social pressure still retains among the people (mostly because a family that has been "shamed" with its association with law will considered as outcasts). But as the dude in the video says, corrective law alone cannot help curb this offense -- there is a great need for a social movement to raise awareness, and there is a great need to help better the status of women.
As I mentioned before, there are
two kinds of India that reside in my nation, and this one is the ugly, backward majority (I say "backwards" because they remain in the past and can't seem to help elevate themselves to the national ideal we've set for ourselves), and to be fair the majority of these cases occur from areas of lower literacy rates. I've even explored the state of Maharashtra further and found, based on sectoral division, that the eastern parts are in the shadows of industrial influence which results in financial drops (by which case, the drops would result in further dowry, and hence more sex selection cases).
Here's a literacy range map of the past decade: Places like Maharashtra, Goa and Kerala still triumph, and correlate directly with their sex ratio, while states like Rajasthan, Bihar and Andhra Pradesh are the worst offenders of both sex selection and literacy (although, with the Women's Rights bill, Andhra Pradesh does fair better than Rajashthan and Bihar in terms of, well, women's rights). Punjab seems to have lifted itself well in the last decade, but
even then...
THIS!....
The battle against the backward classes is still on.
Here's a good blog worth some people's time.
I view it as an example of why campaigning for change at the cultural level is important. For one thing, it seems a bedrock cultural change has to go hand-in-hand with legal changes, because otherwise a corrective law might not even be seen as something to be enforced. Then again, this is a complex battle to wage in the first place: mothers must have autonomy over whether they carry their babies to term after all.
Indeed. Problem is, in those areas, they just don't have the choice. Desperation and destitution can drive societies into insanity. They need a rope of some kind to pull through, and if the Government is too lazy sitting on its ass all day then it's up to us commoners: if it disgusts us so much then why not go about bringing change ourselves?
That said, law usually follows with cultural traction, not the other way around, so indeed they have to go about hand-in-hand.
