GAVAR, Armenia (Thomson Reuters Foundation) — When Karina Aghalaryan discovered she was going to be the mother of a baby girl, the 35-year-old Armenian was ecstatic.
Her family was altogether more lukewarm.
Talk swiftly turned to what the baby clearly wasn’t: a boy.
When Petrosyan got pregnant with a second girl the following year, there were no celebrations. Instead, her mother-in-law marched her to the doctor for an abortion.
“My husband and my mother-in-law forced me to figure out if it was a boy or a girl. When they found out it was a girl, they made me have an abortion,” said Aghalaryan, whose name was changed to avoid being stigmatized in her community.