Well, if she gets hold of a time machine…
The people who are not among the chosen.
Imagine for a moment your birth.
Picture the moment your parents first look at you. Their face falls. The doctors murmur some condolences and quickly pack up their gear. Your father looks angry, mumbles a few words at your mother, and storms out of the room. Your mother has heard that sometimes the problem can be taken care of after birth, but she feels a moment of sympathy for you. After all, aren’t you the same? She can’t bring herself to ask the doctor about her options.
Meanwhile, she hears some heated arguments in the hospital hallway between the in-laws. She hears your mother-in-law, your grandmother, ranting about the “worthless garbage that falls out of her cunt.” Your mother thinks again about how she has ruined her family. You begin to cry in hunger. Your mother hesitates for a moment. How long would you cry? If she didn’t offer you her breast, how long until there was silence? She fantasizes about how quickly this mistake could be over. How she could have another chance to do things right, start over. What would it take? Just a day or two. But she looks in your eyes and sees herself. With great sadness, she feeds you.
When you arrive home, the housekeeper has already carefully packed up the new baby linens and toys. There is hope those can be used another time. You are laid to bed on some old sheets. The birth announcements lay un-mailed on the table until one day someone discreetly throws them out. When the people at work ask your father about the birth, he responds with a brusque “It’s healthy.” Everyone knows what that means and gives him a nod of sympathy. Some tell him he’ll have better luck in the future. A co-worker slips him the business card of an orphanage. Another tells a story of his daughter’s sudden crib death. It seems to be instructive.
One outlier has something good to say. He says “Look at all that hair. She will marry well. Perhaps a businessman! Childhood is just a few years, it may be worth it in the end. One good marriage and you can retire in peace.” In his head your father calculates how much he is going to spend on you in food and school fees. That marriage better come quickly. You are just a few days old and he’s already tired thinking of how much money he is going to have to throw away just keeping you alive. He despairs that even your marriage will not make him break even. A saying he once heard floats into his head. Raising a daughter, it goes, is like watering your neighbor’s garden. For a moment he curses his sentimental wife. She’s not the one who is slaving away to support a bunch of worthless dependents.
Your mother has began to sleep in the living room. Your father comes home later every night. As soon as you are weaned they decide to take jobs in a factory several states over. You are sent to live with your uncle. By now you have learned to be quiet. You are thankful for the long hours you have at school. The books give you a sense of purpose. At night, you eat quickly, and try to ignore the small snide comments about how much you eat. When the family has gone to bed you wash the dishes and pull your blankets out so you can bed down on the couch.
You have grown to hate their fat little brat of a son. When he hits you in childish impudence, everyone laughs in delight. When he scribbles over your homework, they had him more paper, and praise him as a future artist.
When your parents visit twice a year. They seem happy.
But your father always take a moment to pull you aside and remind you how much that you are costing them. He points to his growing wrinkles, and says he is growing old and tired in his factory. He points out your mother’s gray hairs. He says his body will give out soon. You will need to think about the future. They have given their whole life to you, paid your school fees in their sweat. All they want is a little peace in their later years. Surely you can work hard and stay focused. No going off with boys or wasting time. They promise they will find you a suitable match as soon as you are old enough. But you must be good. You must not disappoint them.
For countless people, this is their reality.
My students are very aware that their birth was a disappointment- even a disaster- for their families. Imagine knowing that the first thoughts your parents had about you were “how can we kill this child?” Imagine seeing shame on your mother’s face as she walks you to kindergarten, how her face reddens with envy when she sees her childhood friends and their healthy boys. Picture your father’s cold distance. When you visit your grandparents, there is no doting. Just some sharp reprimands to stay out of the way. When there are family pictures, you are tucked away on the sides. You learn to become withdrawn. You wish you could disappear.
One day, as I was discussing taking advantage of opportunity, I asked one of the my students “What is something you regret?” One student stood up and said “I regret being born a girl.” I was stunned. Her classmates nodded in agreement.
The psychological damage alone, above and beyond the social damage, is too much.
Funnily enough, all this psychological damage could have been prevented had the child been aborted.
Of course, smart-ass. But unless you abort every girl, the surviving girls are going to have to take the fall out.
And if you abort fewer, there are more surviving girls to take the fall out.
The problem isn’t the abortion. The problem is that girls aren’t valued. No amount of keeping people from abortion can make them cherish their daughters.
IMHO, from a spiritual viewpoint abortion harms the woman ultimately far more then the baby. There is enough harm done by the process, no need to inflict more on her by the state. What is needed for her is love so she can heal, which will also reach the spiritually displaced child.
The number one influence on society is society. If our government hadn’t decided to put an end to segregation, how much longer would it have gone on? A government that says it is peachy keen to systematically abort girls is contributing to the problem. Having friends, neighbors and family members that have aborted their girls contributes to the problem.
Once again, I don’t agree with legal restrictions. I’m just arguing ex-selective abortions do cause measurable harm. Did you know China is the only country on the entire planet ever that has a higher female suicide rate than male? In the unlikely case that sex-selective abortions became a meaningful trend, I would agree with taking measures to make the practice less popular.
Sub-Saharan Africa is triumphing over female genital mutilation. Europe is triumphing over antisemitism. Asia can triumph over sex-selective abortion.
While I get your point, the similarity to segregation is tenuous. If the fight against segregation tried to get people to have and love a mixed-race child, I think the analogy would be closer AND segregation (if it were so defined) would still be rampant.
We know that no FGM is better for the girls than FGM. But when you have living, breathing girls tell you they would have been better off dead, it’s hard to argue that their lives are better than no life. And when you have a sky-high suicide rate, it’s hard to argue that encouraging the birth of more girls is the solution.
I know you aren’t being flippant, and neither am I.
So assuming there is a growing supply and demand imbalance are girls/women becoming more valuable social commodities? It would seem to be logical that a shortage of anything is going to make it more valuable. Are women still disposable trash in China today?
Except that that’s not what the government would be saying. The government would be saying “women have the right to abort” with the reason being irrelevant to that right.
Bingo.
What frikking country is this? Afghanistan? China? We are talking about America and American women here aren’t we?
Attitudes towards women and daughters in Japan, Korea and Taiwan are changing and there is no reason to believe that this cange will not come even faster for a population with a shortage of women.
This is based on experiences with my students, who often describe their family experiences with me. You have no idea that stuff I hear- I’ve heard firsthand stories of “having an abortion” after the baby is born. The words “the doctor give baby something to make it not live” will forever haunt me. While this is not representative of all of China, it does represent something that absolutely does happen today. And right now it’s not getting better. It’s not some old custom practiced by rubes that is dying off. It’s a modern problem caused by modern pressures that is getting worse, not better. This is something you find among educated urban middle-class families more often than on a farm.
It’s tempting to think that progress inevitably goes forward, but nothing guarantees that. Progress requires vigilance, and people who are willing to fight for the right thing. The first step towards eliminating a problem is naming that problem and facing the reality of it.
While it is true that women are becoming “valued commodities,” being a “valued commodity” does not always translate into an awesome life, as any pig sold to slaughter can tell you.
Hearing “what’s the harm” pisses me off. This practice causes incalculable harm.
When should a person be protected under the law and why?
Of course I wouldn’t.
Aborting a child that’s going to have severe problems beyond the scope of the parents’ ability to care for it is a decision I support, because it’s really no different than the decision of a woman to not have a child because she feels that for whatever reason, she will not be able to emotionally or financially give it the quality of life that it needs. It’s a humane decision.
BTW, I don’t understand why you asked this question in response to my feeling about eugenics. There’s a big difference between a eugenics-based philosophy that says that a possibly disabled child should be aborted because the human race needs to be “perfected” by discarding “undesirables”, and a humane philosophy that says that a severely disabled child should be aborted because the parents are honest about their lack of emotional and financial preparedness to raise it.
Oh, OK I got you. I still think that things are likely to shift in China as they did anywhere else we saw economic development and women entering the workforce. I believe it is and always has been the case that women’s rights have hinged on woman’s economic independence. When both sons and daugheters have the econmic means to care for their parents, experience tells us that daughters are more likely to care for aging parents than sons (http://gerontologist.oxfordjournals.org/content/25/6/612.abstract), and it looks like the dynamic is continuing in China as well(DO SONS OR DAUGHTERS GIVE MORE MONEY TO PARENTS IN URBAN CHINA? - PMC).
As far as I can tell, we are about a generation away from realtive gender indifference along teh lines of what you see in korea (where some significant minority of women still feel a need to bear sons but its closer to 20% than 80%)
I wonder if all those people voting “no” wold support a woman having and keeping 6 or 10 or 15 babies of the “wrong” sex in her continued efforts to get the “right” one. And supporting them on welfare.
Or giving them all up for adoption whle she keeps trying to get the “right” one…
Where did you pull that definition from? You never actually stated your source.
FTR, multiple sources cited by dictionary.com state that the unborn is considered to be a child.
That seems like something of a poor representation, though accurate in and of itself. Per dictionary.com, I make it 10 cites of a child clearly not including the unborn, 5 clearly including them, and 17 which are unclear or irrelevant to the point.
But of course, as to the overall point, certainly some consider the unborn to be children.
Please tell me you wept for the boys in every other country when you trotted out this factoid? Tell me you didn’t just gloss over the fact that men kill themselves in higher numbers than women on your way to your point.
You have got to be fucking kidding me. You’re lumping that in with established cultural practices?
Why would you wonder that? If a person is pro-life, they generally feel about fetuses the same way you feel about babies. Would you support a woman killing her babies, after they were born, if they were the wrong sex?
Adoption is generally preferable to death, but YMMV. I’m not pro-life, but I can understand the thinking of those who are.