In India, a terrible place to be born a girl

birth of a boy in Machrihwa is celebrated with the purchase of sweetmeats, distributed with joy to fellow villagers. The birth of a girl is, for the most part, not celebrated at all. Women in this village are not eager to dwell on the subject, but many of those with daughters grudgingly admit that worse than the pain of childbirth was the misery of realizing that they had delivered a girl. Juganti Prasad, 30, remembers the reproachful silence that settled over the room where she gave birth to her third daughter. Her mother-in-law handed her the child, and said curtly, "It's a girl, again," before leaving her. "There was no one even to give me a glass of water," Prasad said. "No one bothered to look after me or feed me because it was a girl."As she lay recovering, she could hear relatives in the next-door hut lamenting the calamity. A few weeks afterward, her husband threw her and their three daughters out of his home... IHT