AIIMS, New Delhi accused of promoting sex selection


Mara Hvistendahl’s research leads her into the dark chambers of population control history in Asia

The following excerpt, reproduced from Foreign Policy, reveals just the tip of the criminal icebrg: 

In India, meanwhile, advisors from the World Bank and other organizations pressured the government into adopting a paradigm, as public-health activist Sabu George put it to me, "where the entire problem was population." The Rockefeller Foundation granted $1.5 million to the All India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS), the country's top medical school, and the Ford Foundation chipped in $63,563 for "research into reproductive biology." And sometime in the mid-1960s, Population Council medical director Sheldon Segal showed the institute's doctors how to test human cells for the sex chromatins that indicated a person was female -- a method that was the precursor to fetal sex determination.
Soon after, the technology matured, and second-trimester fetal sex determination became possible using amniocentesis. In 1975, AIIMS doctors inaugurated sex-selective abortion trials at a government hospital, offering amniocentesis to poor women free of charge and then helping them, should they so choose, to abort on the basis of sex. An estimated 1,000 women carrying female fetuses underwent abortions. The doctors touted the study as a population control experiment, and sex-selective abortion spread throughout India. In his autobiography, Segal professed to being shocked to learn that doctors at AIIMS were using a variation on his instructions to perform sex-selective abortions. But he neglected to mention that shortly after his stay in India he stood before an audience at the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development and described sex selection as a method of population control. (The minutes from the meeting describe "sex determination at conception" -- now finally available today through advances in assisted reproductive technology -- but in-utero sex determination was the form of sex selection furthest along at that point.) 

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