Female infanticide in Pakistan

Female infanticide has long been a common practice in Pakistan due to a number of cultural factors.

Mirza was a Kharral of the Sahi muhin... went as a boy to Khewa in Jhang, where he fell in love with his cousin Sahiban, the daughter of the chief man of the place.

These murders were cause of such bloody feuds between the clans that it at the length was thought inauspicious to have daughters, and as soon as they were born, they were strangled as Sahiban had been.

This custom of female infanticide was common among the Kharrals till Colonel Hamilton, Commissioner of Multan, persuaded them to discontinue it.This report is cited in a 2010 book on son preference, giving the context of the Mirza Sahiban tragic romance, and putting the practice in a wider socio-economic analysis.

[7] According to Pakistani surveys and statistics, Pakistan has witnessed 40 million abortion of female children in the past 50 years.

The family honor is an abstract concept involving the perceived quality of worthiness and respectability that affects the social standing and the self-evaluation of a group of related people, both corporately and individually.

[20] In order to avoid such problems related to the honor culture, families reject altogether the idea of having daughters.

[21] Sex-selective abortion - the practice of terminating a pregnancy based upon the female sex of the fetus - is happening in Pakistan, although it is illegal.

However, the large discovery in Karachi shows that many of the female infants were killed because of the local Islamic clerics, who ordered out of wedlock babies should be disregarded.

[26] From January 2017 to April 2018, Edhi Center foundation and Chhipa Welfare organisation have found 345 such new born babies dumped in garbage in Karachi only and 99 percent of them were girls.

It left us wondering whether our society is heading back to primitive age," Anwar Kazmi, a senior manager in Edhi Foundation Karachi, told The News.

Edhi Foundation has found 355 such dead infants from the garbage dumps across the country in 2017; 99 percent of them were identified girls.