100 million baby girls are missing - and the number is rising. They were aborted or killed at birth. Why? Because of a preference for baby boys.
It is a human rights violation on a massive scale perhaps the most widespread form of violent anti-female discrimination in the world today.
The mission of Stop Gendercide Now is to highlight the fact that so many baby girls have disappeared through abortion, infanticide, or neglect and to work for political change to remedy this.
By signing the Stop Gendercide Now Petition, you’ll be joining others in sending a strong message to the leaders of countries like China and India, which have deplorable records in defending the rights of baby girls, born and unborn. Your voice can really make a difference.
The number of baby girls’ lives lost through gendercide has risen sharply as cultural pressures against the birth of baby girls are reinforced by harsh inhumane traditions, coercive population control policies as well as political ideologies. As a result of this, 100 million baby girls have been aborted, killed or left to die. It is a human rights violation on a massive scale.
Boy-preference leading to dramatically fewer baby girls being born and surviving is concentrated primarily in China but also in India and other countries. The mass destruction of girls has produced a systemic gender imbalance in whole populations for example; there are more unmarried young men in China than the entire population of young men in America.
The Stop Gendercide Now Petition puts pressure on the governments of countries with significant sex ratio imbalances:
- To introduce measures to ensure that the killing, fatal neglect or abandonment of baby girls because they are girls is ended.
- To carry out and publish an annual audit giving the sex ratio, the measures put in place to address it, and the progress or otherwise of these measures.
The Stop Gendercide Now Petition will also be copied to the Secretary General of the United Nations calling on the UN to adopt a meaningfully proactive leadership role in ending the horrific practice of signalling out baby girls for abortion and infanticide.
Many steps can be taken. Initiatives can be developed to encourage education for girls: reform of laws and customs that exclude or disadvantage daughters in property inheritance; facilitation of women’s participation in all dimensions of public life; requiring family planning officials, midwives and hospitals to publish the birth sex ratios, and reward advances towards the normal balance of girls to boys.
Showing posts with label china olne child policy. Show all posts
Showing posts with label china olne child policy. Show all posts
Monday, May 31, 2010
Thursday, April 1, 2010
100 million ‘missing’ girls
By Jeff Jacoby, Globe Columnist | March 14, 2010
Source: Boston Globe
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.
Jeff Jacoby can be reached at jacoby@globe.com.
Source: Boston Globe
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.
Jeff Jacoby can be reached at jacoby@globe.com.
Wednesday, March 31, 2010
China's One Child Policy - The Results
Steve Davies, Sky News Online
Two hospital mortuary workers have been arrested after the bodies of 21 babies were found in plastic bags in a river in eastern China.
Eight of the babies found were admitted to the same hospital
Eight of the bodies found wore identification tags, which were traced back to Jining Medical College Hospital in Shandong province.
An investigation has discovered that of the eight identified, three were admitted to the hospital in a critical condition.
The identification tags contained the mothers' names, birth dates, measurements and weight.
Some were placed in hazardous waste bags, before being dumped into the river.
Local authorities claim that some of the babies were aborted foetuses or babies that had died from illness.
Video footage of the discovery has been posted online, showing the babies ranged from newborn to several months old.
Local residents found the bodies, which were floating near the shore.
A spokesman for the Jining Health Bureau told the Chinese state news agency Xinhua, that the hospital staff members involved in the investigation had been suspended.
Abortion is not uncommon in China, with records showing that 13 million babies are terminated each year.
The high level of abortion is largely down to the country's policy of only allowing one child per family in urban areas.
Many of the terminations are female foetuses, as male children are often favoured in Chinese families.
Two hospital mortuary workers have been arrested after the bodies of 21 babies were found in plastic bags in a river in eastern China.
Eight of the babies found were admitted to the same hospital
Eight of the bodies found wore identification tags, which were traced back to Jining Medical College Hospital in Shandong province.
An investigation has discovered that of the eight identified, three were admitted to the hospital in a critical condition.
The identification tags contained the mothers' names, birth dates, measurements and weight.
Some were placed in hazardous waste bags, before being dumped into the river.
Local authorities claim that some of the babies were aborted foetuses or babies that had died from illness.
Video footage of the discovery has been posted online, showing the babies ranged from newborn to several months old.
Local residents found the bodies, which were floating near the shore.
A spokesman for the Jining Health Bureau told the Chinese state news agency Xinhua, that the hospital staff members involved in the investigation had been suspended.
Abortion is not uncommon in China, with records showing that 13 million babies are terminated each year.
The high level of abortion is largely down to the country's policy of only allowing one child per family in urban areas.
Many of the terminations are female foetuses, as male children are often favoured in Chinese families.
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