How They Got There

As promised, yesterday's comments are now followed-up by my reaction to the end of the book. I quote from the chapter "Chinese Orphanages Today, 2003" of Kay Johnson's Wanting a Daughter, Needing a Son.

"Clearly on the negative side of the balance sheet at the turn of the millennium is the continuing rise of the reported sex ratio at birth, now amongh the highest in the world. In the national census of 2000, the average reported sex ratio at birth was 117 boys for every 100 girls, up from 111 reported in the 1990 census, with Guangdong and Hainan reaching an astounding 130 and 135 respectively. These soaring rates seem to have been achieved with the increasingly widespread use of ultrasound for prenatal sex selection. [here I started to get worried] The ultrasound machine has become ubiquitous throughout the countryside, thanks in part to the government's efforts to monitor all fertile women for pregnancies several times a year. [talk about your invasion of privacy!] This widespread use of ultrasound may mitigate rates of abandonment.

"My own limited research, as well as the more extensive published work of other researches, indicates that ultrasound is commonly used in the countryside to select the sex of a second pregnancy when the first pregnancy produced a girl. [No, that can't be right. Sex selection? Deciding to abort once the baby is far enough along to determine the sex? Nobody would be that cruel...] While those living in one-son /two-child areas are usually happpy to have a first-born daughter, most people want to ensure that their second and last permitted pregnancy is a son. The availability of ultrasound makes that perfect outcome possible. In some villages rumor has it that nearly every second pregnancy of mothers with a daughter is subjected to ultrasound, with abortion frequently resulting if the fetus is found to be another female. [Here I lost it, crying silently into my hand for about 2 minutes - praying for these lost girls, their mothers and fathers, and their culture that would encourage this kind of behavior.]

"By 2001 some provincial governments were cracking down hard on this practice by levying fines for suspicious voluntary abortions not related to health concerns and denying permission for a second birth after such an abortion. Micromanaging the uteruses of hundreds of millions of women has led the state into a morass of intrusive and costly monitoring and proliferating punishments as women attempt to wrest from the state some modicum of control over their own fertility outcomes."

Reading this, I am again reminded of how different our societies are - one in which Judeo-Christian values of liberty, equality, and justice eventually won over prejudice, hate, and historical precent; the other in which individuals are not valued, only names. I am grateful to be here, and hope that I can find ways to change the situation over there.