De-coding Female Foeticide as a Long-Standing Curse in Agrarian Societies

Female foeticide or the discriminatory abortion of female foetuses has been and sadly, remains one of the number one killers of Indian girls. This paper aims to use qualitative and quantitative data of recent socio-cultural research to take forward the plough hypothesis developed by Ester Boserup and the work of Alesina et al. The paper approaches the problem of female foeticide as a psychological one, rather than a sociological or a legal one. It traces the trajectory of this psychological malaise from its source in agrarian societies to its most common and deadly expression in modern Asian transitional societies in the form of ‘son preference’, which in turn has contributed to increasing numbers of female foeticide yearly.