Father of First Indian Woman Astronaut Fighting Female Infanticide

By Hilary White
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  HARYANA, India, February 3, 2006 (LifeSiteNews.com) – The father of Kalpana Chawala, India’s first woman astronaut who was killed in the 2003 Columbia space shuttle disaster, told Vancouver’s Georgia Straight paper that he is working to stop the killing of girl children in India. He said he wants to educate people in his home country that girls can grow up to be brave and intelligent.
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  A recent report by the Lancet, a British medical journal, shows that India kills by abortion and infanticide as many as half a million of its girl babies a year, a practice that is creating the same kind of demographic imbalance between men and women as China’s one child policy.
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  Banarsi Lal Chawla said, “I had never realized that my daughter will make a [sic] history by going into space. I did not even know how dangerous is the job of an astronaut. I always saw her smiling in pictures of her training.”
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  Chawla spoke to the Straight on the day that seventeen Indian women who have excelled in various fields were awarded the first Kalpana Chawla Excellence Awards for Women that honour the acheivements of women in Indian society.
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https://www.lifesitenews.com/ldn/2006/jan/06010909.html