NEW DELHI — Experts urged the Indian government to enforce laws against prenatal gender checks and to work to change attitudes after a study showed up to 10 million female fetuses may have been selectively aborted in India over the past two decades. Researchers found that second children were less likely to be girls if the firstborn was a girl, according to the study published Monday in the Lancet, Britain’s leading medical journal. It also said the deficit in the number of girls born as a second child was more than twice as great among educated mothers than among illiterate ones. Daughters traditionally belong to future husbands’ families in India, which maintains the custom of dowry, and therefore are considered by many as a liability. Dipankar Gupta, a sociologist, blamed the failure on the government’s inability to implement laws against fetal sex determination and medical termination of pregnancy on the basis of gender. “Everybody knows there are clinics where these tests are carried out. It’s tantamount to murder. The guilty should be tried for that. The government has to be proactive to change people’s attitude,” he said. Zoya Hasan, a professor of political science […]