A book about the effect of the one child policy in China. Message from an Unknown Chinese Mother, Stories of Loss and Love, by Xinran. A quote, as cited in the March 6th version of The Economist:
At the tiny restaurant where Xinran eats lunch, the waitress tries to kill herself twice, each time after a little girl’s birthday party. The woman is tortured by the happy faces because, thinking it her duty to produce a male heir, she had smothered her baby daughters. She survives because, as well as the bottle of agricultural fertiliser she swallowed, she drank one of the waching-up liquid, thinking that any chemical in a bottle was poison. The detergent diluted the fertiliser’s fatal dose.
We don’t pay enough attention to China’s one child policy. Neither do we pay enough attention to women who have aborted here at home, and the grief they suffer.
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Brigitte can’t help but wonder: Think this is related?
by 
I remember reading this article about a year ago, which was very likely part of my ProLife initiation process http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/13/world/asia/13abortion.html
The phrase that stuck with me after reading it was the slogan “Painless Abortions!”. The woman nearest to me, who confessed her own abortion story to my 16 year old self, was certainly in pain.
In the west I think we consider adopting Chinese baby girls as being proactive in regards to the one child policy. In some small way it is, but in reality so few even get carried to term. Those that do, end up in distressing situations in understaffed orphanages that simply can’t handle the number of children. Many die there. I have never seen the documentary ‘The Dying Rooms’, about China’s orphanages and the neglect of many children there, but I can guess it goes beyond all my most horrific expectations. The one child policy not only leads to abortions but to the criminal neglect of those children that are born.
Brigitte, that is BEYOND disturbing. I don’t think I can bring myself to watch the news footage attached to the full article (as I’m sure there are images that I won’t be able to get out of my head in it). There is also a full story on CNN now.
What’s frightening, is that I don’t think this is an exception to the treatment of unwanted babies (as that piece on ‘The Dying Rooms’ was made in 1995), perhaps not only in China either. I think in part, that the normalization of abortion in the country has led to a dehumanization towards unwanted babies (apparently not only those that are unborn) in general. It’s ridiculous to think that normalizing abortion anywhere else will result in anything different. When we think of solutions for countries like Africa (and everywhere else for that matter), people should keep stories like this in mind before championing unrestricted ‘access’ to abortions. There is little difference between a 25 week old premature born baby and 25 week old fetus, and if we have unrestricted opportunities to terminate one, it’s difficult to argue that you can’t ‘terminate’ the other.
The CNN article simply says that the bodies were ‘improperly discarded’, but I wonder how that was determined so quickly.
If many chinese parents consider girls so worthless they can be killed even after birth, then banning abortion or ending the one-child policy seems to be only treating the symptom. They’ll still have girls, and they’ll still consider girls worthless. Only now they’ll just turn to simple neglect while they keep trying for a son. Would a better approach be to encourage a culture that isn’t so blatantly sexist, and recognises male and female as equal?