Gender-biased sex selection must end

It is truly distressing that despite the grandiloquent promises of women's empowerment in Bangladesh, we are still a long way from ensuring their safety, much less their full potential. A woman's fight for survival in this patriarchal world is so ruthless that it starts from the womb, with an overwhelming majority of families still preferring sons over daughters – and some going to extreme lengths to terminate the pregnancy when they find out they are going to have a girl child. As new technologies that can identify the sex of a foetus at early stages of pregrancy become more easily available, the risk of gender-biased sex selection also increases, according to experts.

Given the depressing reality, we welcome the formulation of a national guideline for the prevention of gender-biased sex selection, which aims to create awareness about preventing the misuse of prenatal diagnosis procedures and tests for determining the sex of the foetus at any time of the pregnancy, as well as the abuse of infertility treatment for sex selection. The guideline was adopted as per a High Court directive in 2020, which also prohibited medical professionals from divulging the sex of a foetus during prenatal procedures.

Unfortunately, despite the court order, families can still easily access the information in many medical establishments across the country. Thus, it is imperative that key stakeholders, such as medical staff, are engaged and sensitised about the ethical, social and demographic implications of sex selection, which the guideline proposes to do.

A study conducted by the University of Dhaka with support from UNFPA found that both men and women preferred sons over daughters, but that women were more likely to want sons than men. This may be because in many families, particularly in rural areas, women are still blamed when they give birth to daughters and are valued less for their failure to provide a male heir. Experts suggest that even the knowledge that they are carrying girls can at times lead mothers to suffer from depression and fail to provide adequate care and nutrition to their foetuses during pregnancy.

All these suggest that a lot more needs to be done to establish gender equality in the country. There must be renewed focus on challenging entrenched patriarchal norms that still undervalue women to such an enormous extent that their very birth is considered a curse.