Playwright Carolyn Lloyd-Davies on the background to why she wanted to base a new drama on the controversial and sensitive issue of gender foeticide

It has taken two whole years and 15 drafts, to write Silent on the Matter — my new play about sex-selective abortion. It took so long partly because I wanted a story that wasn’t clichéd or stereotyped and partly because the more I learnt about the subject, the more research I was compelled to do. It wasn’t enough just to read statistics, articles and investigation results, I had to get inside the mind of the main characters. I wanted to write from their point of view; to answer the age-old question of why good people make inexplicably bad decisions.

What originally caught my eye was an investigation by the Daily Telegraph that found doctors were carrying out selective abortions in some ethnic communities in Britain. However, a subsequent Government inquiry concluded there was no stat-istical evidence to support the claim. This prompted The Independent to do its own investigation, looking at census data from the Office for National Statistics, investigating whether having a daughter as a first child raised the probability of a family’s second-born child being a boy. The natural ratio of boys to girls at birth is 1.05, meaning 105 boys to 100 girls but their research found ratios of between 1.1 and 1.2 for the second child of these families, stating: “a heavy bias in favour of boys that could not be explained if the parents were completely ‘blind’ to the sex of their offspring”.

These findings were hard to believe, but an Indian friend of mine in Oxford was not surprised. Through her, I started to understand about the pressures on young Indian women and also, from her point of view, how hypocritical our Western culture is. We express shock at the thought of aborting a child because it’s the ‘wrong sex’ but accept the choice of a woman to abort a child on grounds of interfering with her career, something other cultures would find equally hard to comprehend.

As the story line unfolded, there were more ethical conundrums: does a woman’s right to choose, over-ride the unborn girl’s right to live? If a doctor has been shown on camera offering an abortion on grounds of gender, why is it ‘not in the public’s interest to prosecute’, as concluded by the Director of Public Prosecutions? Unlike in India today, gender-related abortions are not illegal in this country, if it can be proved that cultural pressure would be likely to result in psychological damage to the woman.

Silent on the Matter is the first stage play in the UK to open up this sensitive and complex area for discuss-ion, exposing hypocrisy, unspoken conflict and under-lying tensions between close friends from two very diff-erent cultures. David Trevaskis, a talented and creative director, leads the cast of six professional actors.

Silent on the Matter is at The Old Fire Station on May 8 and 9, at 7.45pm.