Can we give our daughters the life they deserve?

I have always wanted to be a mother. In my early teens when I would sneer at the suggestion of getting married someday, I still knew I wanted to parent children even if on my own. This desire was constant, and independent of every other choice in my life. But over the last few years, my desire to be a mother has been dimming increasingly.

The answer to the why of this can be found in national and international news. There’s the high cost of basics like housing, food, and education. These are predictably not reflected in private-sector salaries, whose increments barely drag up year-on-year, let alone rise in line with inflation. There’s the culture of corruption that impacts every facet of civilian life in Bangladesh. Then there are the hundreds of preventable road crashes and other random deaths. Social safety projects, even ones targeting children, often get stalled with no immediate plans from the government to restart them. And, due to stalled immunisation programmes, among other factors, over 1,000 children have died so far this year of a disease we had all but conquered.

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There are a million different ill fates which I would like to protect my unborn child against. But, given the reality in Bangladesh, I am especially hesitant to birth a daughter. Despite the advancements in education and child and maternal healthcare over the decades, girls and women remain two of the most vulnerable sections of our population. In the first eight months of this year, police data recorded 14,602 incidents of violence against women and children. This averages out to more than 60 instances of violence each day.

During the same period, 254 children (ages 0-17 years) died due to various forms of violence. According to data from Ain o Salish Kendra (ASK), the major categories of violence are: killed after being raped, murder after an attempt to rape, killed after physical torture, killed after torture (in the domestic sphere), shot dead, suicide, recovery of a missing child’s dead body, and recovered dead body, among 19 other categories. Nearly 29 percent of the 254 children killed were aged 6 and under.

Meanwhile, it often seems that any case of violence against children the brutality of which fails to grab netizens’ attention is fated to languish in the limbo of our justice system, if it is not settled out of court altogether. As a nation, we fail too frequently and on multiple levels to protect our children.

My personal dilemma about motherhood likely resonates with many young people. But it is also important to note the massive urban-rural divide in Bangladesh. Voluntary childlessness is also affected by this divide and is, after all, a privileged choice. In rural Bangladesh especially, motherhood is a default. According to one UNFPA finding, 77 percent of women in the country cannot independently decide when they will conceive, how many times, or the gap between each child’s birth. The obstacles cited include lack of proper support from husbands and societal pressures such as anxiety about the future, economic uncertainty, inadequate healthcare, household expenses, and job insecurity.

Women’s lack of autonomy over reproduction is also hardly surprising. The Multiple Indicator Cluster Survey (MICS) 2025 found that 47.2 percent of young women surveyed were married before the age of 18, while 13.4 percent were married before the age of 15. Furthermore, 23.8 percent of women aged 15-19 and 25.7 percent of those aged 20-24 had husbands who were 10 or more years older. And although child marriage appears to be on a decline since the 2012-13 MICS, the percentage of girls aged 15-19 years who are currently married rose sharply from 32.9 percent in the 2019 MICS to 38.9 percent in the latest survey.

The MICS 2025 report also establishes that education is the most decisive factor when it comes to determining if a woman will have a baby before the age of 18. This is reflected in data collected for the latest Bangladesh Education Statistics report, which found that, in 2023, the highest dropout rate for girls was 34.87 percent at the secondary level, followed by 22.45 percent at the higher secondary level, 12.32 percent at the primary level, and only 6.53 percent at the diploma level.

If a girl is deprived of proper education and married off in her formative years to a man who has a decade’s worth of life experience over her, it is easy to understand how most girls and women in Bangladesh do not get to choose when to bear children, how many, and how often. Of course, girls in wealthier and more educated households are able to study for longer and get married later than those in poorer households. But even monetary privilege cannot prevent the gendered discrimination which follows women and girls in nearly all spheres of life.

As seen in the World Economic Forum’s (WEF) recent Global Gender Gap Report 2026, Bangladesh has dropped 55 places in the global index measuring gender parity in one year. The report measures progress towards gender parity across four dimensions: economic participation and opportunity, educational attainment, health and survival, and political empowerment. The country’s overall gender parity score fell to 71.2 percent, from 77.5 percent a year earlier—a drop described as one of the largest setbacks recorded worldwide. Bangladesh’s weakest performance in terms of gender parity was for women’s economic participation and opportunities, as the report says women earn an estimated $4,670 a year, compared with $12,440 for men. Over the years, even though women’s workforce participation has increased, this gap in income has only widened.

No girl in Bangladesh needs to see any of the above numbers to know that she is unequal to a boy, and even more unequal to a man when she becomes a woman. In education, play, work, domestic settings, travel, celebrations, worship, and even leisure, girls and women cannot avoid facing reminders of their gender and being told how it should limit them. Why would one want to put a little girl through a life like this?

On National Girl Child Day, we should celebrate the resilience of girls across the country who persevere against myriad gendered hurdles. But it is also a day when those leading industries, institutions, ministries, communities, and families should probe the structures of their respective organisations and factors limiting girls’ and women’s parity with boys and men. Without the deliberate removal of such factors, this day might remain one we observe more than we celebrate.

Afia Jahin is a member of the editorial team at The Daily Star.

Views expressed in this article are the author's own. 

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