DRUG ADDICTION, No comparison. Indian women for the most part have never taken a drug for intoxicating reasons. The lower caste women sometimes chew pan, a mild drug. Many liberated women however are dependent on drugs to get them through the day and keep from having nervous breakdowns.
ABORTION, In India, until recently, it was illegal. But now, due to Western influence, it has become legal. Still it is done very seldom and then mostly in the big cities. The reason there is so little abortion is because there is hardly any illicit sex. The statistics in Western countries are astronomical. Modem medicine has not yet "discovered" the harm done by abortion, but Vedic scripture describes such reaction as very severe.
DIVORCE, No comparison. It practically does not exist at all in Eastern countries, especially India. The societies and families are too close knit. Often the marriages are arranged before the children have even reached puberty. In the West however, the divorce rate is somewhere around 50%. The problems from such a high divorce rate have a snowballing effect. Children become neglected. Grandparents suffer tremendously from not being able to see their loved ones. Child abuse becomes commonplace. Juvenile delinquency and then crime increases. Welfare for all these forlorn women and children taxes the honest workers who ultimately rebel, etc., etc., etc. The list could go on indefinitely.
RAPE AND SEXUAL CRIMES, No comparison. The punishment for such crimes in India is instant death if caught by the victim's family and no one will protest such justice. Otherwise prison. Indian prisons don't have color televisions either. If not death or prison, then one is stripped of his caste and therefore doomed to spend the rest of his life on the streets as an outcast. Because of the severity of the punishment, such crimes are so rare in India that they make national headlines. Need anything be said about this problem in Western countries. Pornography and sex-based advertising breeds such criminals who run rampant.
DELINQUENT AND RUNAWAY CHILDREN: Again, families are very close in Eastern countries. They generally stay together for life, and often you will find under one roof four generations, all very happily living together. Needless to say the concept of youngsters running away of leaving home in disgust is very, very rare. But in the West, very few families stay together. Usually the children leave home the moment they get a driver's license. The family unit in America is an imagination only, whereas in India, the family is still the most important institution in the country. Thus people are peaceful.
MARITAL VIOLENCE: Naturally there are always emotions in any family situation and no doubt the husband may occasionally strike his wife, but again, families are very close knit in India, and so, such occurrences are rare and not considered important. Just as a father may sometimes strike his son out of love to correct him, so a man may also sometimes also strike his wife. As Prabhupada says in hundreds of letters, "Discrepancies between husband and wife are never taken very seriously and there is never the question of divorce." In the West this is a tremendous problem. Daily women are being severely beaten by their irreligious, and barbaric husbands and the government cannot do anything since they are responsible for such degradation in the first place by allowing intoxication, pornography, meat eating, etc., etc., etc.
CHILD MOLESTATION OR ABUSE: In India, if such a thing occurred from outside the family; that person would be instantly killed or castrated by the family, so it is naturally very rare. Within the family, very rare if ever does such a thing occur. The reason being that there are very few sexual perverts in Eastern countries. In Indian movie houses, even today, they are not allowed to show lips touching in a kiss. Pornography is outlawed. Any form of sex outside of marriage is so severely condemned that such crimes are seldom even entertained in the mind, what to speak of carried out physically. We interviewed one young married man, a jeweler, and he told us that during his entire childhood right up until marriage, he had never talked of sex with other men or even thought of sex with women. He married at 22 years of age. Needless to say his mind was considerably more peaceful than this Western counterparts.
FAMILY UNITY: As mentioned above, the families always stay together and there is hardly ever less than three generations living in one house. The girls become a part of the husband's household and may not be living with her parents, but the sons are almost always intimately connected with the parents, right up until the parents die of old age. This is the natural system. There is no social security in most Eastern countries. The social security in India is called the family. And within the family, the sons are duty-bound to care for the parents in their old age. If they neglect this duty, they are outcast. But this is not at all objectionable since the sons enjoy the company of their parents. The young wife also likes to have the grandparents around to help care for all the children, help cooking, etc. The grandfather is usually good for helping around the house in so many ways. There is never a dull moment. If a father has three sons, quite often all the sons, along with their wives and at least three children each are living under the same roof with the grandfather and grandmother. Of course such houses are generally very large, but even if the family is not able to afford a large house, everyone is quite happy because they are all so close to each other. Being blood related, there is no fear of being cheated by outside business partners, a major problem in big Western corporations. As stated above, family unity in the West is almost an imagination.
RETIREMENT: Retirement in India for the ladies means to live with loved ones right up until death. There are no old folks homes in India where people are forced to five out their lives alone. Such a concept is unheard of except for those seriously engaged in spiritual practices. Then they are monks and they are the most happy people in the world because they have established communion with God. We cannot think of anything more pitiable than to see grandmothers and grandfathers forced to live out their lives alone in convalescent homes, hardly ever or even never seeing their children and grandchildren. But this is very common in the West.
EDUCATION LEVEL: Indian women generally don't get much education but instead stay home and learn all about how to be a good mother. In India today, women are getting a basic education, but generally they don't go beyond that. In the Western countries most women go to college and many become professionals in one field or another. This may be all right for those women who don't want to ever marry, but if a woman wants to be a housewife and raise a family, then her time would be better spent in teaming cooking, sewing, cleaning, decorating, painting, embroidery, flower arranging, etc.
SUICIDE RATE: In India, in the days when women were extremely chaste, they would often commit suicide when their husbands died since they felt helpless. They were completely devoted to their husbands and to die with the husband is the highest religious act a woman can do. This one act guarantees her elevation, along with her husband, to the heavenly planets or the spiritual world if they had qualified themselves. But other than this form of suicide which is called "sati" in Sanskrit, there is very little suicide in India since all women are protected and cared for very nicely. In the West of course there are many suicides, by both men and women. This is due to the unnatural, artificial lifestyles most Westerners live. They have lots of outer stimulation, but little to no inner peace and so they can't cope with the real problems of life.
HAPPINESS LEVEL: This is what it really boils down to in the end. Who is happier? The Indian women certainly don't have the same kind of intense sense gratification that the Western women "enjoy" such as discos, jet travel to distant lands, credit cards, fancy cars, microwave ovens, video movies daily, satellite television, etc. Indian women lead very simple and generally peaceful lives. There are some common expressions such as "Money can't buy love...... The best things in life are free...... Happiness comes from within." It is commonly known that a child playing with a very costly electronic toy, will not be enjoying himself any more than the child playing with rocks by the river bank. Happiness does not depend on external conditions but comes from within. The comparisons above, and these universally accepted truths clearly indicate that Indian women, although not as flashy, are indeed much happier than their Western counterparts.