When I was in a crowded convention hall in Tallahassee Florida, amid foetal models and policy whitepapers, I met a couple from Kerala India, who weren't there to debate theory. They were there to save girls, one ultrasound, one pregnancy, one life at a time. Their crisis pregnancy centre wasn't funded by governments or celebrated in headlines. It was a quiet act of defiance against a cultural machine that had decided daughters were disposable.
They told me stories no statistic could capture: a mother threatened with divorce for carrying a third girl, a grandmother slipping abortion pills into tea, a newborn left in a field because the family "couldn't afford another mouth," especially a female one. Their work included post-birth home visits, not to celebrate, but to verify survival. That's the world sex-selective abortion has built.
India banned sex determination and sex-selective abortion in 1994 with the PCPNDT Act. Thirty-one years later, in 2025, there have been only 617 convictions nationwide. Eighteen states have recorded zero in recent years. Meanwhile, portable ultrasound machines cross state lines like contraband. Abortion pills are sold in backrooms and bazaars. Clinics operate out of guesthouses. The law is a ghost, present in statute, absent in reality.
In September 2025, authorities in Karnataka and Andhra Pradesh India intercepted a five-month abortion arranged because the foetus was female, the fourth daughter. In April, Uttar Pradesh busted a pill-and-procedure network filing 120 police reports. In Gujarat, a radiologist and nurse ran a mobile termination service from rented rooms.
These aren't outliers. They're the system.
The Numbers Are Screaming
India's sex ratio at birth hovers between 917 and 929 girls per 1,000 boys (SRS 2023). In Haryana, it dips to 879. Pew Research estimates 17.3 million girls were aborted for being female between 2009 and 2019. When you include postnatal neglect, infanticide by starvation or exposure, the toll climbs past 63 million missing women.
That's not a gender gap. That's a gender genocide.
The consequences aren't abstract. In villages with 30% fewer women, men can't find wives. Bride trafficking surges, girls kidnapped from poorer states, sold into marriage, or worse. Sexual violence rises. Rural economies stagnate without women's labour and education. The very goals of development, literacy, health, poverty reduction, are undermined by a policy that eliminates half the future workforce before birth.
And yet, the world stays quiet.
Why the Silence?
Trade. Aid. Diplomacy. India is a strategic partner, a massive market, a counterweight to China. Western governments and NGOs pour billions into "reproductive health" programs, often the same ones that fund abortion access without safeguards. To speak out against sex-selective abortion is to risk being labelled anti-choice, anti-woman, or anti-progress.
So, the outrage is muted. The UN holds conferences on gender equality while ignoring the most lethal form of gender discrimination on Earth. Foreign aid flows to family planning NGOs that won't touch the issue. Media covers dowry deaths and rape cases, but rarely connects them to the prenatal purge that precedes them.
The Kerala Model: Resistance Without Applause
The couple I met doesn't wait for permission. They:
Visit homes after every girl is born, unannounced, unapologetic.
Counsel husbands and in-laws on the value of daughters, using faith, economics, and moral clarity.
Shelter pregnant women facing coercion.
Train volunteers to spot illegal ultrasound vans.
They do this with donations, prayer, and sheer will. No government grants. No international awards.
What Must Happen Now
1.Enforce thelaw. Raid clinics. Jail doctors. Seize machines. Make examples.
2.Track every ultrasound. Register devices. Require digital logs. End anonymity.
3.Fund the rescuers. Support crisis pregnancy centres, not just abortion providers.
4.Speak the truth. Call it what it is: femicide, enabled by abortion technology and cultural collusion.
5.End the hypocrisy. No more "reproductive rights" rhetoric that ignores dead daughters.
The World Must Choose
Every aborted girl was someone's daughter, sister, future mother. She was erased not for poverty or health, but for chromosomes. And the global silence isn't neutrality, it's complicity.
The Kerala couple asked me one question before they left: "If this were boys being eliminated, would the world still call it a woman's right?"
I didn't have an answer then. I do now.
No.
It's time to stop pretending abortion is always neutral. In the wrong hands, combined with son preference and weak laws, it becomes the most efficient tool of gender cleansing the world has ever seen.
63 million missing girls isn't a statistic. It's a scream India and the world has chosen not to hear.