Doctors in the Indian capital, New Delhi, are launching a campaign to raise awareness about a practice of aborting female foetuses simply because they are female.

Doctor Vinay Aggarwal of the Indian Medical Association, IMA, which represents general practitioners all over India, said that by helping parents abort a female foetus, doctors denied an innocent girl in the womb the right to live.

A law passed three years ago forbids what Mr Aggarwal calls the degrading and inhuman practice.

The IMA says that according to the last census eight years ago, in some states such as Rajasthan, there were only six hundred females for every thousand males.