Why (c) would reduce female feticide is not explained in the editorial.
In certain sections of Indian Hindu society, a woman, upon marriage, comes to be regarded as a member of her husband's family. As a result, female children are regarded as a burden, an expensive investment that will one day go on to enrich her husband's family. This vicious logic, in some cases, fuels the selective abortion of female fetuses.
Now, given this chain of reasoning, why would the strengthening of the economic rights of women lead to lower levels of female feticide? If the parents of a female fetus are planning to kill her -- because, were she to live, she would soak up her parents' resources only to enrich the family she marries into -- why would they be dissuaded if the law strengthens her right to inherit her parents' property? (In fact the reverse may well be true: if women are shorn of their right to inherit their parents' property, parents of a female fetus may regard her as less of a bad investment and may well be persuaded to be a little merciful and let her live.)
Moreover, if the economic right of women to work is strengthened, her increased income would end up enriching not her initial family but her husband's, thereby providing no economic incentive against female feticide. You might think that a married woman with her own income would be likely to help her parents financially and that, consequently, stronger economic rights for women may reduce female feticide. But let's go back into the minds of the sort of people who kill female fetuses. They are conditioned to think of their married daughters as people of some other family. Therefore, it is unlikely that such people would expect any financial help from their married daughters, irrespective of whether they earned a paycheck or not.
Needless to say, the strengthening of the economic rights of Indian women is valuable in itself. But why the EPW thinks this would reduce the slaughter of female fetuses is unclear to me.
I have been thinking, for a while now, that India needs to try providing a sizable subsidy for every newborn girl. However, I was somewhat discouraged about the likely effectiveness of my subsidy idea when the Lancet study (mentioned in the EPW editorial) revealed that "selective abortion of the female foetus is the highest in the most educated and in the richest 20% of the households." After all, such families are unlikely to be persuaded to be merciful by a mere subsidy, I thought.
But another finding of the Lancet study gives me some hope that a workable subsidy may yet be implementable. "[W]hen the first child was a male, there was no fall in the sex ratio of the second child. But when the first born was a female, the sex ratio of the second births declined." In other words, the danger of the murder of a female fetus is really serious only when the mother has already had a daughter and is now hoping for a son. So, instead of giving a subsidy for every newborn girl, it may be a good idea to start with a less ambitious subsidy for parents only if their second child is also their second daughter. (The previous sentence has been slightly revised.) And as this would be a limited subsidy, its size could be made very large -- large enough perhaps to tempt even the rich to show some mercy.
