I love the country of India. I just love it. I have been there eight or nine times and I’m scheduled to go there in just another few weeks to speak at a pro-life national summit. It’s a really exciting place to be. But India is a challenge in many ways, especially for pro-life work and for Christianity in some places. Like other countries that I’ve formerly lived and ministered in, India really is an enigma in that there’s not just one India. There are in essence many Indias with many regional leaders, many different cultures and languages that sometimes collide in explosions of conflict. There are places where there’s no conflict whatsoever. Everything seems to get on swimmingly in India. But again, that is part of the enigma of a country that is so complex.

I’ve posted a video on India on the YouTube channel; I warn you that parts of it are a little disturbing. The video is of a fellow who calls himself Dune Boy, referencing the name of the city near where he lives, which is Dehradun, India. I have been to Dehradun multiple times and the images that you see in the video are graphic. There was a church service that was interrupted just this past week in Dehradun by people who were nationalists, Hindu people who were really upset about the church meeting. They broke into the middle of the church meeting and began beating the attendees mercilessly. Some of the footage was edited to remove the more controversial parts of it. They trashed the church and took the offering box with all the money that had been collected over the past several weeks or months. They took away a lot of the things that were part of the church, such as iconography and things like that. It was really a sad situation. The reason I’m mentioning this to you is to let you know that India is a challenge for Christianity and for missions. There are places in India where it is dangerous to be a Christian and Christians are routinely persecuted, beaten or in some other way marginalized.

I did a post on India on the YouTube channel in this series of online recordings that I’ve been doing over the past couple of years. It was one of the most watched posts that I’ve ever put up. It was primarily centered around the dowry system of India. The dowry is the payment system that comes into play when a man and woman get married and there’s a kind of a bridal price, if you will, that’s not uncommon even in our culture. There are certain gifts that are expected or traditional. Some people would say it’s not really all that different in India, but it is in most places in India if we could simply see it for what it is. It lends itself to the problem that India is already riddled with–abortion. It’s already rampant in India. Because of the dowry system little girls are often unwanted because families cannot foresee in the future being able to pay what it takes to get a girl married. In India what this leads to is the companion problem to abortion which is infanticide, the selection of a baby to die on purpose. In this particular case it would be gendercide, the selection of one gender for extermination in favor of another gender. In most places in the world, including in India, this manifests itself most commonly in the death of baby girls in favor of a cultural preference for baby boys. Now if baby boys are preferred, it might be for many reasons, such as the fact that boys might be able to earn more money or boys carry on a family name or for whatever it is that boys might be preferred. One of the contributing factors is that a girl saddles you with the future responsibility of having to pay a dowry price in order to have that girl be married at the station you would like her to be married at. It is a real problem in that many families do not want to have baby girls.

Here’s an example. In 2019 the government of India launched a probe, and you can read this article that I’m referencing in a Newsweek 2019 magazine. This Newsweek 2019 article reported that in the clinics and hospitals serving dozens of villages across a northern India district, there were 216 babies born in a three-month period. Among those 216 live births, there was not one girl born. All 216 of them were boys. Now, is it possible that you can flip a coin 216 times in a row and have it land on tails? Yes, it is possible, but it is mathematically and statistically unlikely. Let’s just admit it right here that girls are being chosen for extermination across those villages for a cultural preference for baby boys. This has always been a problem in modern India because of the dowry system. From the 1960s the Indian government began to address the imbalance and unfairness of the dowry system. In the 1980s they made reforms into the nineties. When Modi realized that the statistics showed that 63 million girls were missing in India because of this gender preference, they really began to crack down on sex determinative ultrasounds and things like that. It is illegal to have an ultrasound to find out the gender of your baby, but it’s still possible behind the scenes to pay for an ultrasound to reveal the gender. Some doctors are corrupt and would like to make that money to tell you the gender of your baby. But in a lot of these villages, in the very poor areas, this doesn’t end up being feticide or abortion or gendercide only. It ends up being infanticide because in many of these places they are waiting until the baby is born, to be able to see with their own eyes whether it is a girl or a boy. At that point the baby is disposed of or in other ways euthanized because it is a girl.

Every minute in India a baby is aborted or left to die because it is a girl. Every one minute a girl is abandoned or aborted in India specifically for the crime of being female. One in five Indian women will be raped or experience attempted rape by the time they reach adulthood. One in four girls in India will never reach puberty because of the assault on women in that culture. There is a major imbalance in preference for boys over girls in many parts of India. In some parts of India it’s not as pronounced, but it is a problem. The government recognizes it as a problem and we at PassionLife recognize it as a problem because we recognize at PassionLife, as you do if you are a fellow Christian who understands the theology of life and the basic moral code of how humans should treat each other, that men and women are created equal with unalienable human rights. And we do not prefer girls over boys or men over women. We do not prefer women over men or boys over girls. We prefer humanity and the moral code that God has put into our system by saying that all humans are made in the image and the likeness of God. Second Corinthians chapter six tells us that as children of God, we are co-heirs and equals both girls and boys, men and women are equal in the sight of God. It does not mean that we are equal in our abilities. It does not mean we are equal in our genetics and in our biology. We are wonderfully different and distinct as men and women and as boys and girls are from one another, but we are equal in value in the sight of God.

That is why PassionLife starts with theology in order to address these issues and cultural maladies. We start with theology because we do not trust that politicians or rallies in the park on Saturdays are going to bring about the cultural change and the seismic shifts that we need to see happen in order to address grievous injustices in our world and our societies. Join PassionLife, pray for India, follow us. I’ll be going there in October. You can follow me on my next trip, sign up for our text updates to find out how things are going while I’m there. We look forward to continuing to partner with you in prayer and finances, in going and encouraging one another as we continue to fight the injustices of abortion, infanticide and gendercide in the country of India.