AmericanPapist Comments
Where are the feminists on this one?
That's my country. The requirement of dowries is shameful.
That is heinous. I was thinking that was par for the course for a non-Christian nation, but then I think about our abortion tragedy and I am left sort of confused.
What happens when the supposedly cardinal virtue of "choice" is used to weed out undesirables from your population? The very contradiction should make it apparent that the value of choice is anything but cardinal.
The value of the female also should be inherently obvious as the very vessel for your future child regardless of gender, can only be female.
But then again the pro-life movement has been saying stuff like this for decades...
I would not be surprised if someone came up with the novel solution of homosexual marriages to make up for the gender disparity. I mean, you wouldn't want to make it illegal to abort girls, would you? That would run against the very grain of so-called feminism.
And indeed China is hurting from mandatory abortions inflicted as part of the State's plan to exercise totalitarian control over the bodies and minds of her populace.
Abortion is societal suicide.
Back when the good Doctor & I were living in Britain, and I was pregnant with kid #4, the NIH passed a policy that refused to disclose the sex of a baby during an ultrasound for these very grounds. Many Indian & Pakistani immigrants were aborting babies once they knew the sex - I guess females are just not as desirable in their cultures.
On a similar note, at the National Association of Catholic Scholars' conference back in 2004, a statistician gave a very interesting paper on the fact that in most Asian countries there will definite shortage of women in the next few decades, mostly due to these cultural norms. In China this trend is catastrophic, because this policy is made worse by the "one child per family" policy.
Good luck to the premier. India's not going to be changing its deplorable attitude toward women any time soon, nor is any number of other countries. Hey, wait--wasn't CHRISTIANITY supposed to be responsible for all women's woes? How do we explain that in countries where Christianity has never been a major cultural / religious player? :-S
There is now the phenomenon of "bachelor villages" in China as a result of foetal sex-selection. Chinese men are actually having to _import_ women to marry. In CHINA. With OVER A BILLION PEOPLE. They have to bring in foreigners because they've killed so many of their girls. India is clearly heading in this direction.
Salon.com actually had a Broadsheet item on the matter of sex-selection in India. I was one of the ones who pointed out that this is, indeed, a by-product of choice: If you give women the right to abort, you simply cannot say that they can't exercise that right under circumstances that you find distasteful. Quite true.
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