The Human Rights Journalism Fellowship Program launched an awareness video about gender issues in Kosovo. It was supported by the European Union Office and aimed to bring into attention of all people and state institutions selective abortion, femicide, which is known as the prenatal killing of female babies.
Many women are pressured by society, relatives and sometimes by their husbands to abort if they have baby girls. Boys are preferred to girls because of customs that existed in the earlier ages. According to these traditions boys can help family, take care of parents when they get old, inherit the surname and consequently keep the 'tribe alive'. In the video some women were interviewed to tell their sad experiences. They desperately admitted that were forced to abort as many times as they knew that they had a girl inside them. Some of them even went to visit “traditional doctors” to be cured from this illness.
States institutions reported that selective abortion is a criminal offence, which usually happens in private clinics, however it is almost impossible for them to find evidence to punish delinquents, because everything is done in silence and is not registered.