Hindu Medicine c8.223

c8.223

What will the child’s sex be? This is a crucial question, of vital importance in the individual’s fate under the Hindu paternal order, which entails more suffering than happiness for women. The incidence of the birth of a girl-child, in fact, is viewed¹ in non-medical tradition as an effect of bad karman. In terms of pre-scientific physiology the following solution is offered: “If (in the mixture of semen and menstrual blood) the seed prevails, a boy will be the issue; if the menstrual blood prevails, it will be a girl; from the equal proportion of both springs the hermaphrodite.”