Newborn babies killing in Pakistan increase

Almaty. January 18. Kazakhstan Today - More than 1,000 infants - most of them girls - were killed or abandoned to die in Pakistan last year, the agency reports.

The number of dead infants found last year - 1,210 - was up from 890 in 2008 and 999 in 2009, says the Edhi Foundation, charity working to reverse the trend, manager in Karachi, Anwar Kazmi, AFP reported on Monday.

In the conservative Muslim nation, where the birth of children outside of marriage is condemned and adultery is a crime punishable by death under strict interpretations of Islamic law, infanticide is a crime on the rise.

The infanticide figures are collected only from Pakistan's main cities, leaving out huge swathes of the largely rural nation, and the charity says that in December alone it found 40 dead babies left in garbage dumps and sewers.

"People leave these children mostly because they think they are illegitimate, but they are as innocent and loveable as all human beings," says the charity's founder, well-known humanitarian Abdul Sattar Edhi.

Most children found are less than a week old.

The death toll is far worse among girls, says manager Kazmi, with nine out of ten dead babies the charity finds being female.

"The number of infanticides of girls has substantially increased," Kazmi says, a rise attributed to increased poverty across the country.

Girls are seen by many Pakistanis as a greater economic burden as most women are not permitted to work and are considered to be the financial responsibilty of their fathers, and later their husbands.

A Pakistani family can be forced to raise more than one million rupees (11,700 dollars) to marry their daughter off.

Abortion is prohibited in Pakistan, except when the mother's life is at risk from her pregnancy, but advocates say that legalisation would reduce infanticide and save mothers from potentially fatal back-street terminations.

According to Pakistani law, anyone found to have abandoned an infant can be jailed for seven years, while anyone guilty of secretly burying a child can be imprisoned for two years. Murder is punishable with life imprisonment.

But crimes of infanticide are rarely prosecuted.

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