Born Unwanted: A Reflection On Survival, Womanhood, And The Price Of Becoming
Amanda Hortiz | Unsplash I was born in the early 1990s, in a city whose name I will not mention — because it could have been any city in India. Behind every glittering skyline and every festival that worships goddesses, there exists another kind of prayer — a silent one, made in clinics and behind closed doors: Please, let it be a boy.
I was not that boy. My mother has told me the story of my birth more than once. She told it with a strange detachment, as though she were recalling the life of someone else, not her own child. She had tried to abort me, and said. “It was too late,” she added, almost apologetically. And then, quieter still, “Before you, I did it once. It was a girl, too.”
Those words didn’t land all at once. They echoed over the years, shaping my understanding of love, worth, and belonging. I grew up knowing I was the accident that survived, the daughter who arrived too late to be erased.
The weight of an unwanted birth
Stanislav Cema / Shutterstock
When my mother told me about the abortion that preceded me, I was ten. We were sitting in the courtyard on a harsh winter afternoon, soaking up the sun. She was washing lentils, her hands submerged in a steel bowl, and she said it almost casually. I remember staring at her hands — the same hands that had held me as a baby — and in that instant, the sun seemed to vanish. The warmth on my skin dissolved, and the winter crept inside me. It was as if the chill in the air had found its way into my bones, into my very being.
There was no malice in her voice, only weariness — a kind of exhaustion that mothers of her generation carried quietly. She had been raised to believe that daughters are burdens — expensive to marry, powerless to inherit, and destined to belong to someone else’s home. She didn’t hate me — she hated what having me meant.
I have often wondered what it must feel like for a mother to end her daughter’s life — or to watch it happen. Not every mother who gives in to that horror does so without feeling. Some, I imagine, weep until their bodies tremble, some numb themselves to survive, while some, like my own mother, bury the contradiction — the unbearable collision between love and fear, between instinct and conditioning.
Female infanticide, for many women, is not born of cruelty but of desperation. It is the slow, suffocating inheritance of poverty, patriarchy, and helplessness. In villages across India, mothers have been known to turn their faces away as a midwife smothers the newborn girl.
But this is not only a village story — it is also an urban story, threaded into modern clinics, hospitals, and city lives where the ultrasound whispers “girl” and the consequences follow. The moral wound of such an act must live on in the hearts of many women, passing silently from one generation to another. My mother carried that wound, too. She bore me out of failure — not joy — and then had to live with the guilt of not loving me as she should.
Growing up in the shadow of rejection
My childhood was ordinary on the surface: school uniforms, mango slices, homework, and summer holidays. But beneath it ran a quiet current of emotional hunger. I was never beaten or starved. Yet, I was never fully seen either. My mother’s love was practical — meals cooked, clothes ironed, my illnesses tended to — but never warm.
There were moments when she looked at me, and something flickered in her eyes — a mixture of guilt, pity, and confusion. I didn’t have the language for it then, but now I understand — she tried to love me as best she could, but every time she looked at me, she saw her failure to conform to a cruel system. I was her survival and her shame, both at once.
As a child, I learned not to ask for too much. I learned to be small, to take up less space, and to speak softly. My existence felt conditional — as though I had to earn my right to be alive. Explicitly and implicitly, I was repeatedly told — You were not supposed to be here, and then, before I knew, I had internalized this dialogue and was telling it to myself.
This kind of wound doesn’t bleed; it festers. It seeps into everything — how you study, how you dream, how you love. It becomes both a burden and often a strange kind of fuel.
The law that tried to stop the unseen
In 1994, the Indian Parliament passed the Pre‑Conception and Pre‑Natal Diagnostic Techniques (Prohibition of Sex Selection) Act, 1994, entering into force on January 1, 1996, with the explicit aim of banning prenatal sex-determination and curbing the misuse of diagnostic techniques for sex-selective abortions.
The law prohibits clinics and imaging centres from revealing the sex of a fetus, or advertising sex-selection services, and mandates registration and regulation of genetic counselling centres, labs, and ultrasound clinics. It followed mounting evidence of rapidly declining child sex ratios — for example, in certain states where the number of girls born per thousand boys dropped dramatically because of selective abortions.
The intention was clear — give girls the chance to be born, to live, to be counted. But intent and enforcement rarely align neatly. Though the PCPNDT Act provides stringent penalties — including imprisonment, fines, and sealing of machines for violations — sex-selective practices persist through multiple back-door channels.
In urban environments, for instance, ultrasound clinics may technically comply with registration but still discreetly communicate the fetal sex through coded language, sign-signals, or by asking indirect questions like “What do you want?” after the scan. Some couples travelling abroad seek termination of a “female” fetus in jurisdictions with laxer oversight. Portable or unregistered ultrasound machines are trafficked or used in remote suburbs or rental settings where oversight is weak. (Recent investigations uncovered machines being sold illicitly across states for these purposes.)
Another channel — despite the law, abortions can be carried out through clinics not fully registered under the Act or through clandestine “MTP kits” (medical termination of pregnancy) bought online or via local chemists, where the primary motivation is termination based on sex rather than medical need.
Societal pressure also makes circumventing the law easier. Families deeply want a son; they may push doctors, clinics, or labs to find the fetal sex. Some doctors or technicians collude, asking pregnant women their preference and then reporting accordingly. Moreover, the Act is only as strong as monitoring, state-wise enforcement, and public awareness. Many scanning centres operate in grey zones, where rules are sometimes weakly enforced, awareness among medical staff is variable, and penalties may feel remote.
In effect, while the law addresses the medical and technical side of sex-selection, the root causes — son-preference, dowry pressures, socio-economic realities — remain deeply entrenched. My own story grew in that very rootbed.
Fueling the fire
When I was old enough to understand what my mother had done — and almost done — I made a quiet vow. I would prove her wrong. I would prove everyone wrong.
At first, it was not rebellion that drove me, but a desperate need for worth. I threw myself into academics and sports, clinging to the one language society respected — achievement. If being a girl made me unwanted, then I would become the kind of girl who could not be ignored.
I couldn't afford to lose, so I won every swim meet, every chess competition, and became the first female engineer in my family. I remember the day my acceptance letter arrived — the crisp white envelope from a prestigious university. My father smiled, uncertain how to express pride.
My mother said nothing for a long time. Later that evening, I overheard her on the phone with a relative: “Yes, she’s going to study engineering… No, I don’t know where she got it from.” She didn’t know that the fire came from her — from the rejection and the emptiness.
Years later, I moved overseas for work. I boarded that plane with one suitcase and a thousand ghosts, and joined one of the top engineering firms in the world, a fact that sometimes still feels surreal. People see the success, the titles, the polished version of my life — but they don’t see the origin story written in silence and survival. They call it resilience, but I call it a lifelong attempt to justify my existence.
Sometimes, late at night, I ask myself: Is this what it takes for a woman to be seen? To build a fortress out of pain? To earn love by outperforming rejection, every single day?
I wonder what my life might have been if I had been loved freely, if I had been celebrated rather than tolerated. Would I still have become an engineer? Maybe. But perhaps I would have laughed more along the way. Perhaps I would have been driven by curiosity instead of fear. Perhaps I would have learned ambition not as self-defense, but as joy.
We celebrate the stories of women who “rose above” — who turned trauma into triumph. And yes, there is insane courage in that, but sometimes I want to ask the world: Why must we suffer to be worthy? Why must pain be the price of progress?
The mirror of society
My personal story is only one reflection in a much larger mirror. Across India, millions of girls were never born. Millions more were born into quiet resentment, told from their earliest years that they were liabilities.
Furthermore, when a society systematically discards girls, the gender ratio tilts. Communities end up with too many men, too few women. That imbalance leads to instability, devaluation of women, increased violence, trafficking, child marriages, and bride-buying.
When I think about change — real, lasting change — I no longer place my faith solely in technology or policy. I place it in education. Not the kind that fills your head with equations or theories, but the kind that opens your heart and mind.
Real education, to me, is awareness. It is the courage to question tradition and the willingness to unlearn centuries of conditioning.
In school, I learned how to solve differential equations, but no one taught me how patriarchy shapes grief, or how silence perpetuates violence. I learned the periodic table, but not how societal hierarchies poison the spirit of families and nations alike.
If education is only about employability, it will produce skilled workers, not free people. What India — what every nation — truly needs is an education that teaches equality not as a slogan, but as a daily practice. The kind that asks, “What does it mean to value a human life?” and insists on an answer.
Because patriarchy does not just wound women; it cripples entire communities. When girls are killed or silenced, the future is impoverished — not just morally, but materially. A society that denies half its population the right to thrive cannot truly prosper. Every missing girl is not just a tragedy; she is a lost doctor, a lost artist, a lost engineer, a lost mother, a lost teacher. She is a missing possibility.
My mother and I
Over the years, my relationship with my mother has changed. I no longer see her as the villain of my story. She is, instead, the mirror through which I understand the cost of ignorance.
Earlier this year, I was home visiting my mother. After dinner, we sat together in the living room, and I played The Midwife’s Confession documentary for her: a stark, unflinching exploration of female infanticide and sex-selective practices in India, told through midwives’ testimonies, hidden births, and the human cost behind the statistics.
Halfway through the film, the weight of the stories became too much for her. She rose quietly, tears brimming in her eyes, and left the room.
The screen still flickered. I stayed behind, watching, feeling the same thaw of winter-cold in my chest. I think that was the first time she acknowledged, even indirectly, that she had been wrong. And I realized then that she had carried her own kind of grief all these years — the grief of doing what she thought she had to do, and then realizing what it had cost.
When I look at her now, I see a woman shaped by fear, not hatred. And I find, surprisingly, that I can forgive her. Because to hate her would be to hate myself — to perpetuate the same cycle of blame that keeps us bound.
What does it mean to heal?
Healing, I have learned, does not mean erasing the past. It means facing it until it loses its power to define you. It means telling the story you once hid from — out loud, so that it no longer festers in silence.
I used to think my life was defined by survival. Now I think it’s defined by a witness. I am here to bear witness — to the lost daughters, the broken mothers, and the slow awakening of a nation learning to love its women again.
And yet, even as I write this, I know that change is fragile. That somewhere right now, another mother is whispering a desperate prayer over an ultrasound report. That another girl is being told she is too much, too loud, too ambitious. That patriarchy, like pollution, lingers even when you can’t see it.
But I also know this: every story told breaks the silence a little more. Every girl who survives — and thrives — pushes the horizon of what’s possible.
I often think of the paradox of my existence: that I am both proof of patriarchy’s cruelty and of womanhood’s resilience. I survived not because my world was kind, but because it wasn’t. And while I have turned that survival into success, I no longer glorify the struggle. It was unnecessary and avoidable.
The measure of progress is not how many women overcome obstacles, but how few obstacles remain for them to overcome. When I speak to younger girls now — daughters of friends, nieces, students — I tell them: You do not have to earn your right to exist. You were wanted by life itself. And that is enough.
I write this for them, for my mother, for myself, and for the sister I never met — the one who did not survive. She is the ghost at the edge of my story, the absence that gives it meaning.
If I could speak to her now, I would tell her: I am living for both of us. And that someday, I hope no mother will have to choose between her fear and her daughter’s life.
Until then, I will keep speaking, keep building, keep teaching — not just equations, but empathy, because that is what real education is: the slow, courageous work of unlearning cruelty and remembering how to love.
N. Azaar is a writer who explores everyday existentialism, grief in its softest and sharpest forms, the anatomy of love, and the absurd beauty of carrying hope.
