Ban gives way to intake of gender selection drugs

Ritika Jha Palial

Tribune News Service

Chandigarh, January 11

In a “fallout” of the Pre-Conception, Pre-Natal Diagnostic Techniques (PCPNDT Act) that prohibits sex determination using ultrasound, intake of ayurvedic sex selection drugs by women desiring to have a son, continues to be rampant, at least in North India.

According to clinical observations of experts at the PGIMER, the intake of these drugs —perceived as a sureshot method to conceive a male child — is prevalent prominently in Punjab and Haryana.

Over 1,400 women registered are with the ante-natal couselling clinic at the PGIMER since 2006. These include mothers of children with congenital malformation, or with problems of infertility and complicated pregnancies.

“The counselling sessions reveal that how these women are under pressure mostly by their in-laws and social circle to have a male child. Many of them present a history of intake of ayurvedic drugs in the initial three months of their pregnancy,” said Professor Amarjeet Singh, School of Public Health, PGIMER, who first published a study on congenital malformations in the journal,Indian Pediatrics, in 1994, a first such paper in the country. 

“While no evidence of effectiveness of these drugs in ensuring sex selection has been found in medical science, a series of our studies have rather found that the steroids present in these ayurvedic drugs have resulted into malformities in children (when consumed by expectant women),” he added.

Also, the latest study conducted by his team, concluded in 2008, found that all 203 mothers of the children born with deformities at the PGIMER had history of intake of sex selection drugs. 

The ante-natal clinic and genetic clinic are managed by Dr Jasvinder Kalra (gynaecology) and Dr Inusha Panigrahi’s (pediatrics), PGI.