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100 Million 'Missing' Girls
· Monday, March 15, 2010
In India each year, it is estimated that as many as a million baby girls are aborted by parents determined not to raise a daughter. Those unborn girls are the victims of a fierce cultural preference for boys — and of modern imaging technology that makes it easy to learn the sex of a baby in the womb. Ultrasound scans started becoming widely available in India in the 1980s; since then, an estimated 10 million female babies have been destroyed during pregnancy.
Sex-selection tests are illegal in India. So are sex-selective abortions. But the laws are rarely enforced and easily circumvented. Rather than openly disclose the sex of a fetus after an ultrasound exam, for example, some Indian doctors signal the results by giving the parents pink or blue candies or candles. Others dispense with subtlety altogether, advertising their services with such brazen slogans as "Spend 500 rupees now and save 50,000 rupees later" — an allusion to the potentially crippling dowry that an Indian bride's parents are expected to pay when their daughter gets married. Many couples have taken that deal. The result is an alarming shortage of young Indian women — and a growing population of young Indian men with little prospect of finding a wife.
It isn't only in India that unborn girls are being killed on such a mass scale.
Last week, in a chilling cover story titled "The worldwide war on baby girls," The Economist noted that in many parts of China, the ratio of boys to girls is now 124-to-100. "These rates are biologically impossible without human intervention," the magazine observed, and their consequences will be dire. The Chinese Academy of Social Sciences recently warned that within 10 years, 24 million Chinese men will find themselves condemned to permanent bachelorhood. Among Chinese 19 and younger, the prospects are even worse: By 2020, there will be 30 million to 40 million more males in this age group than females. That is a staggering number of what the Chinese call guanggun, or "bare branches" — young males with little prospect of marriage and a stable family life.
"In any country," says The Economist, "rootless young males spell trouble; in Asian societies, where marriage and children are the recognized routes into society, single men are almost like outlaws. Crime rates, bride trafficking, sexual violence, even female suicide rates are all rising and will rise further as the lopsided generations reach their maturity."
The war against baby girls has spread to South Korea, Singapore, and Taiwan, to the former Soviet republics of Armenia, Azerbaijan, and Georgia, and even to Asian-American communities in the United States. And if you think that the antidote to this "gendercide" is modernization, better living standards, and more education, think again.
"It is not the country's poorest but its richest who are eliminating baby girls at the highest rate, regardless of religion or caste," the Times of London reported in 2007. "Delhi's leafiest suburbs have among the lowest ratio of girls to boys in India, while the two states with the absolute lowest ratio are those with the highest per-capita income: Punjab and Haryana." Similarly in China, the higher a province's literacy rate or income per head, the more skewed its sexual disparities.
It is not material poverty that leads these cultures to blithely accept the killing of their very youngest girls. It is a poverty of values, an ancient prejudice that views daughters as a financial burden to be avoided, rather than a blessing to be cherished.
The Chinese writer Xinran Xue writes in a new book, "Message from an Unkown Chinese Mother," about visiting a peasant family in Shandong while the mother is giving birth. The baby turns out to be a girl, and Xinran hears a man's voice mutter: "Useless thing!" To her horror, the "useless thing" is thrown into a pail of slops to be drowned.
"That's a living child," I said in a shaking voice, pointing at the slops pail.
"It's not a child," she corrected me. "It's a girl baby, and we can't keep it. Around these parts, you can't get by without a son. Girl babies don't count."
On its cover, The Economist asks: "What happened to 100 million baby girls?" The answer is simple — and sickening: They didn't count.
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David S.
God WILL judge a culture that considers children (whether boy or girl) a burden to be shunned rather than a blessing to be cherished. Count on it. I only pray that the blood on every American's hands for this curse of abortion that we should have stamped out on our own shores decades ago does not condemn us too.
"Lo, children are an heritage of the LORD: and the fruit of the womb is his reward. As arrows are in the hand of a mighty man; so are children of the youth. Happy is the man that hath his quiver full of them:" - Psalm 127:3-5
Posted March 15, 2010 at 8:26:55 AM
Ruth Ann Wilson
Jeremiah 10:2, "Thus saith the Lord, learn not the way of the heathen," This is an "example" of why the Lord called Abraham out of Ur of the Chaldees. These awful practices, the things we know and the things we don't know.
It is wonderful to be in a Christian Nation. We've been "called out by the Lord not to learn the ways of the heathens."
God Save the United States, land that I love.
For God & Country
Ruth Ann Wilson
Posted March 15, 2010 at 9:19:42 AM
Alex D.
The story about the baby in the bucket is horrible, but I'm certain it is true. In 1979, while walking along an irrigation canal in southern China my friends and I came across the body of a newborn girl, umbilical cord still attached, floating in the canal. We pointed out the body to several local people, including the local authorities, but no one wanted to know anything. The local authorities spent several days wining and dining us and taking us to see the new factories, schools, hospitals, etc., to show us the "new, modern China". The memory of those modern facilities has faded, but the memory of that little girl's body is as fresh as ever.
Posted March 15, 2010 at 11:16:23 AM
Marcus
abortion is still legal in the US. how about we fix our own back yard first?
Alex D.,
go check out the buckets at the abortion houses(i don't say clinic because clinic implies medical treatment, not murder)here in the US. However the babies are disposed of makes no difference, the result is the same.
and don't forget, your president is OK with letting a baby die on the table after having been ripped from the womb.
we are still very much animals. some of us just more so than others, like poorly domesticated dogs.
why we try to convince ourselves that we are more than animals, i don't understand. it's a delusion that sets up the more sensitive of our species for a lot of disappointment.
Posted March 15, 2010 at 12:26:31 PM
Loni Nauman
WHAT ARE PROPLE THINKING? DO THEY NOT REALIZE
THEY ARE DESTROYING THEIR OWN PEOPLE? EVERY CHILD IS A PRECIOUS HUMAN BEING NOT TO BE DEFILED BUT
TO BE PROTECTED BY THEIR VERY OWN IMAGE. THE VERY RICH AND POWERFUL ARE THE MOST FOOLISH AND BLINDED
BY THEIR LACK OF WISDOM, LOVE, AND TRUE KNOWLEDGE
ABOUT LIFE. THEY CHOOSE DEATH OVER LIFE TO THEIR VERY SOULS AND DEATH TO THEMSELVES AS WELL AS THEIR DAUGHTERS. TIME IS RUNNING OUT.
Posted March 15, 2010 at 12:46:32 PM
MichaelSSEC
Sitting here reading this as my granddaughter plays on the floor nearby. How lucky she is to have been born in America, where we love our kids whether they are boys or girls.
This is a powerful example of how simple moral decency can work profound differences in cultures, even changing the very makeup of the population.
Yet, we should not be too proud of ourselves, for we still embrace abortion on a national scale (although last year for the first time in 30 years we began winning that argument, so it's a matter of time now) and if our Socialized medicine pushers have their way we will begin selecting fetuses by trait and aborting any unlucky to be absent the traits we desire. Creating human life would be no more sacred or dignified than picking out a puppy or a new car. That sort of inhuman mentality must be opposed with every vigor we can muster.
Posted March 15, 2010 at 9:49:45 PM
veritaseequitas
What else can you expect from Godless cultures such as India and China? The unfortunate thing is America is not far behind. We have already decimated two generations of children through abortion. The rolling effect of this is astounding. But, abortion will never be blamed by the Godless; for they believe it is their "right" to murder their own.
Support your local crisis pregnancy centers.
Posted March 16, 2010 at 6:54:54 AM
Alex D.
Marcus, I agree with you completely on the abortion issue. Killing a baby is murder, pure and simple, regardless of whether it is killed in the womb or thrown in a ditch or slop bucket and left to drown. The only difference here seems to be affluence. The affluent get to determine the sex before birth and abort, the less affluent give birth first. We have a lot of work to do to change the culture to promote life, to get everyone to realize all children are a gift from God, and should be celebrated as such.
Posted March 16, 2010 at 9:14:15 AM