Lots of stings, no pain

Third of four parts

“In childhood a female must be subject to her father, in youth to her husband, when her lord is dead to her sons; a woman must never be independent.” — Verse 5:148 in the Hindu laws of Manu

JAIPUR, India — Meena Sharma, a 26-year-old freelance reporter, knew there were massive violations of government law forbidding doctors from telling pregnant women the sex of their unborn children and using abortion to eliminate unwanted girls.

She approached Shripal Shaktawat, Jaipur bureau chief of the Sahara Samay TV network, with an idea he could not refuse. What if she lined up several pregnant women with TV cameras hidden in their purses who would say their fetus was a girl and they wanted an abortion? Miss Sharma would go along, playing the part of the woman’s aunt or mother-in-law.

“It was an emotional issue for me,” said the reporter, who remembers as a 14-year-old seeing one of her pregnant aunts being instructed by a physician to abort the female fetus.

In nine episodes from April 4 to June 13, the TV network aired a 12-hour series, “Murder in the Womb.” It was based on undercover visits to 140 health clinics in 36 cities in four Indian states: Rajasthan, Uttar Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh and Gujarat.

Doctors in 100 clinics either agreed to do a sex-determination test and abortion or gave referrals to other doctors who would. Both actions are illegal.

Mr. Shaktawat, who posed as a husband, and his “wife” would tell doctors they already had daughters and had no wish to birth any more.

“Now the baby has grown bigger and it will come out alive,” Dr. Nidhi Malhotra from the city of Chittorgarh in south Rajasthan is shown saying in Hindi on the hidden video. “Will you kill it?”

That same video shows the doctor laughing as she levels a fee of 2,000 rupees (about $44) to abort a child in the seventh month of pregnancy.

It had taken Miss Sharma a year to compile the devastating report, which showed doctor after doctor on camera illegally urging the women — all of whom were at least in their fifth month or more — to abort their female offspring. Abortion is illegal in India after the 20th week unless there are threats to the mother’s health.

The documentaries shamed the region’s most prominent doctors. A group of physicians offered the station $34 million to cancel the series.

On April 14, the government filed charges against 21 Rajasthan doctors in the series — but did not prosecute them. The Rajasthan Medical Council suspended the licenses of seven — but allowed them to continue practicing.

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