The three deadliest words in the world: It’s a girl
A.G. Harmon writes at Patheos:
The woman in this picture has just related to a film crew how she killed her newborn daughter by strangulation. She killed eight of her newborn daughters, in fact, and can lead you to the tree-shaded plot of ground where she has buried all of them. The earth is rich there, rounded and fertile. The mound where the infants lie rises over them in a gentle slope, like the swell of mother-flesh.
This woman is not unusual in her Indian village. She and her neighbors explain through a strange kind of laughter the myriad ways that they have dispatched their female children. One of the most common is to dampen a piece of cloth—large enough to swaddle the child in—then lay the wet fabric over the baby’s face, so that she can’t breathe. Other options are to expose the child to the elements or to place her in a box near the river and walk away.
Not only are these practices common in India, they’re common throughout many countries and across many cultures. It’s estimated that as many as 200 million girls are missing from the world’s population due to the practice of gendercide, the culturally-based killing of a child (overwhelmingly female) on the basis of its sex.
… In such societies, boys provide for the family and care for the elderly; girls must be married off by way of an expensive dowry that many parents cannot afford. So the system in turn breeds a culture of death, giving perverse birth to all sorts of attendant crimes
… Girls conceived in areas with technological advancements are discovered—hunted does not seem too strong a word—by way of portable sonograms, administered at the insistence of mothers, in-laws, and husbands, who demand to know whether the baby is worth keeping, meaning a boy (such practices go on in America too, as The Economist reports). If not, an abortion follows, often disregarding the mother’s wishes.
… It is a damnable lie not to call this business what it is.
These girls are being murdered at every stage of life, and those who survive are being subjected to every form of indignity. However tragic the poverty that motivates such a thing, the fact remains. To deny it, to be too uncomfortable to look at it, to be too embarrassed to see it, is to be complicit in it.
Read the full text of this excellent article by clicking here.
A chilling new documentary, It’s a Girl, exposes the widespread custom of female gendercide.
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