The worldwide war on baby girls

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lynnie

Puritan Board Graduate
This is a lengthy and tragic article. I had no idea that the practice was so common outside China. They also discuss the serious lack of brides and the correlation with trafficking of young women. I only pasted in the first paragraphs. It makes me want to not forget to pray for the Christians in these countries, that God will use them to bring light to this darkness.

Gendercide: The worldwide war on baby girls | The Economist

XINRAN XUE, a Chinese writer, describes visiting a peasant family in the Yimeng area of Shandong province. The wife was giving birth. “We had scarcely sat down in the kitchen”, she writes (see article), “when we heard a moan of pain from the bedroom next door…The cries from the inner room grew louder—and abruptly stopped. There was a low sob, and then a man’s gruff voice said accusingly: ‘Useless thing!’

“Suddenly, I thought I heard a slight movement in the slops pail behind me,” Miss Xinran remembers. “To my absolute horror, I saw a tiny foot poking out of the pail. The midwife must have dropped that tiny baby alive into the slops pail! I nearly threw myself at it, but the two policemen [who had accompanied me] held my shoulders in a firm grip. ‘Don’t move, you can’t save it, it’s too late.’

“‘But that’s...murder...and you’re the police!’ The little foot was still now. The policemen held on to me for a few more minutes. ‘Doing a baby girl is not a big thing around here,’ [an] older woman said comfortingly. ‘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.’”

In January 2010 the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences (CASS) showed what can happen to a country when girl babies don’t count. Within ten years, the academy said, one in five young men would be unable to find a bride because of the dearth of young women—a figure unprecedented in a country at peace.

The number is based on the sexual discrepancy among people aged 19 and below. According to CASS, China in 2020 will have 30m-40m more men of this age than young women. For comparison, there are 23m boys below the age of 20 in Germany, France and Britain combined and around 40m American boys and young men. So within ten years, China faces the prospect of having the equivalent of the whole young male population of America, or almost twice that of Europe’s three largest countries, with little prospect of marriage, untethered to a home of their own and without the stake in society that marriage and children provide.

Gendercide—to borrow the title of a 1985 book by Mary Anne Warren—is often seen as an unintended consequence of China’s one-child policy, or as a product of poverty or ignorance. But that cannot be the whole story. The surplus of bachelors—called in China guanggun, or “bare branches”— seems to have accelerated between 1990 and 2005, in ways not obviously linked to the one-child policy, which was introduced in 1979. And, as is becoming clear, the war against baby girls is not confined to China.

Parts of India have sex ratios as skewed as anything in its northern neighbour. Other East Asian countries—South Korea, Singapore and Taiwan—have peculiarly high numbers of male births. So, since the collapse of the Soviet Union, have former communist countries in the Caucasus and the western Balkans. Even subsets of America’s population are following suit, though not the population as a whole.

The real cause, argues Nick Eberstadt, a demographer at the American Enterprise Institute, a think-tank in Washington, DC, is not any country’s particular policy but “the fateful collision between overweening son preference, the use of rapidly spreading prenatal sex-determination technology and declining fertility.” These are global trends. And the selective destruction of baby girls is global, too.
 
“‘But that’s...murder...and you’re the police!’ The little foot was still now. The policemen held on to me for a few more minutes. ‘Doing a baby girl is not a big thing around here,’ [an] older woman said comfortingly. ‘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.’”

Reminds me of a certain American practice. :barfy:
 
I find the article to be informing but makes me believe the problem is much worse than I ever suspected.
 
It's horrible. In the city it is not as big a deal, but in the countryside, whoa. When we arrived in China, in 1997, the police had just broken a kidnapping ring where the kidnappers were stealing women from the cities (where having a girl is not that big a deal) and selling them to the countryside as brides. They shot 30 of the ringleaders publicly in a city in Shandong province and the problem went away.
 
China has a gender imbalance ratio and many men are going to grow up having to find a wife overseas or is unable to find one. This coupled together with the aging population will make economic situations challenging for them in the long run.
 
China has a gender imbalance ratio and many men are going to grow up having to find a wife overseas or is unable to find one. This coupled together with the aging population will make economic situations challenging for them in the long run.

Not to mention severe potential political instability. A huge population of unable-to-settle-down young men can be a downright tinderbox.
 
:( :pray2:
There seems so little that can be done except weep and pray.
I'm also giving thanks to God for his mercy to me.... I don't feel as if I could have sustained life or reason if I had been in the place of that poor mother
 
“‘But that’s...murder...and you’re the police!’ The little foot was still now. The policemen held on to me for a few more minutes. ‘Doing a baby girl is not a big thing around here,’ [an] older woman said comfortingly. ‘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.’”

Reminds me of a certain American practice. :barfy:

Don't be fooled into thinking that abortion is an "American" practice. The US and Canada only account for 3% of worldwide abortions.
 
The entire situation is horrible. I have two friends both who have adopted girls from other countries (representing China, Haiti and Romania). These girls were rescued from certain death because of the male preference and/or one-child policies. What disturbs me is that we are moving in that direction in the USA.
 
How strange are cultural differences. We are so enjoying our first granddaughter and have so often remarked to one another how different it is to have her vs. our other grandchildren, all boys. Even though we love them all, little girls are special. Don't nearly all non Christian cultures look down on women? None the less, this is a wretched situation and worthy of our prayers.
 
Don't be fooled into thinking that abortion is an "American" practice. The US and Canada only account for 3% of worldwide abortions.

I didn't mean "distinctly American." I meant that we do what the article describes too, albeit in a different, less visible way. That's an interesting statistic, though.
 
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