Indian parents paying to turn their baby girls into boys

The disturbing reports claim that surgeons in the Indian state of Madhya Pradesh are performing sex-change surgeries on baby girls at the behest of parents who want sons to improve the family's income prospects.

This stunning revelation is reported by the respected Hindustan Times newspaper, saying surgeons in the city of Indore are performing hundreds of sex-change operations on baby girls every year.

Indian girls converting to boys!
The HT report claims that Indian parents are not hesitating to take their little girls for gender reassignment surgery in order to turn them into son. They are even spending lakhs of rupees to ‘convert’ their little daughters.

The report said Sunday that the 'shocking, unprecedented trend is taking place at conservative Indore's well-known clinics and hospitals on children who are one to five years old.

Parents having their girl children surgically "corrected"
The HT alleged that as many as 300 girls, some as young as one-year-old, were surgically turned into boys after their parents paid about 145,000 rupees ($3,200) each for the operations, known as genitoplasty.

Genitoplasty is a surgery which is used to fix genital abnormalities in adults. While performing the procedure on children, surgeons use the child's female organs to create a penis, and inject the infant with male hormones to create a boy.

Due to the low cost of the surgery and relative ease, parents from big cities like Delhi and Mumbai are having their young daughters undergo gender reassignment surgery, according to the Hindustan Times.

Paediatrics can make children infertile
Dr V P Goswami, the president of the Indian Academy of Paediatrics in Indore, however, warned parents that the procedure would leave their child impotent and infertile in adulthood.

Describing the disclosures as shocking, Dr Goswami said, “Genitoplasty is possible on a normal baby of both the sexes but later on these organs will not grow with the hormonal influence and this will lead to their infertility as well as their impotency. It is shocking news and we will be looking into it and taking corrective measures.”

He added, “Parents have to consider the social as well as the psychological impact of such procedures on the child.”

Sex-change surgeries spark outrage
According to a report by the international newspaper Telegraph, women's and children's rights advocates condemned the practice of converting the children as India’s growing "social madness" that made a "mockery of women in India.”

In the wake of disturbing media reports, the National Commission for Protection of Child Rights asked the state government to investigate the doctors and the hospitals named in the reports.

The Medical Council of India has said a medical board of experts is needed to assess the need for such kind of surgery on a case by case basis, and stringent checks in all cities.

The Indian Medical Association secretary general Dr DR Rai has called for legal guidelines on the issue. “Our country has a big problem of sex ratio and son preference of parents,” he said.

Probe is on
Madhya Pradesh CM and the National Human Rights Commission (NHRC), meanwhile, have ordered inquiries into the issue.

“I have asked the chief secretary (Avani Vaish) to form a panel of experts to ascertain if such a thing is happening in Indore and if the practice is illegal,” chief minister Shivraj Singh Chouhan told HT on Tuesday.

Who would be in the committee? Chouhan said, “Our state does not have many experts. So doctors from Delhi’s All India Institute of Medical Sciences or other reputed institutes could be part of the committee.”