GE machines used to break law

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“A single death is a tragedy; a million deaths is a statistic.” — Josef Stalin

BANGALORE, India — The streets are cleaner here in the country’s tech capital of Bangalore than elsewhere in India; still, squalor surrounds the modern glass-walled offices of dozens of American and European corporations.

Security guards pursue anyone wishing to linger by the gates of General Electric’s walled-off compound in the exclusive Whitefields suburb east of town. In 1990, the giant American multinational teamed up with Wipro Ltd., a Bangalore software provider, to manufacture and distribute a low-cost ultrasound machine.

Why ultrasound machines? GE spokesmen have repeatedly refused to comment on the matter, but by 2000, according to www.gehealthcare.com, Wipro-GE had shipped out 6,500 of the machines in India. Wipro’s Web site, www.wiprocorporate.com, claims it pioneered the manufacture of ultrasound equipment for India.

GE’s latest portable machine is the Logiq 100 model. Its American equivalent, the Logiq Book XP, sells for $16,900 new or $11,000 refurbished, according to the sales department at National Ultrasound, an American distributor based in Duluth, Ga.

Indian activists who oppose the widespread abortion of female fetuses say GE is among a handful of companies that manufacture the machines for the Indian market.

Under Indian law, doctors operating ultrasound machines must fill out forms showing the reason for each procedure, which is permitted only in the case of an abnormal pregnancy. But the government can only monitor the 25,770 machines that have been officially registered.

The actual number of machines is estimated at anywhere from 70,000 — by the London Daily Mail — to 100,000, according to the British Medical Journal. The portable ones end up in rural areas, where technology makes it possible for any woman to determine the sex of her child. The fetus can then be terminated at a government hospital, where abortions, like other procedures, are free for those who cannot pay.

Sabu George, a New Delhi activist who in 2000 filed a lawsuit against the government for failing to enforce its own laws against female feticide, said findings have revealed a disproportionate number of GE machines in northwest India, which has the lowest proportion of females to males.

“Those concerned with human rights [must] expose the transnational corporations involved in marketing ultrasound machines for these purposes,” he said, adding that Wipro-GE especially targets smaller towns with the help of cheap credit provided by GE Capital Services India.

The situation is only going to get worse, he added, as new technologies are now making it possible to select male embryos over female ones for implantation into a woman’s womb.

“In the United States, ultrasound is used to protect the fetus,” he said. “Here it is used to destroy it.”

Women in black

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