A Celebration of Women
Adele Butler – Women of Spirit
GIRLS MATTER!
Imagine being told that you are useless. … or left to die because of your gender.
Imagine living in a society where even your family doesn’t want you because of a policy or an expensive system. Imagine not having a mother’s love because you are not a boy. In China and India, this is a harsh reality.
I read a little background history of the one-child policy and learned that it was Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping in 1979 to limit communist China’s population growth. It was supposed to be a temporary measure but it is still in effect today. Couples were limited to one child, received fines, were pressured to abort their children if they were discovered to be girls and forced sterilization followed second or subsequent pregnancies, http://geography.about.com/od/populationgeography/a/onechild.htm.
I never knew this sort of thing existed until I watched a documentary about it. Female babies were aborted or abandoned. I heard of one father calling the baby “useless” before he discarded her into a pail of slops. Girls didn’t matter in that region of China http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2010/03/14/100_million_missing_girls/.
I came across an article where the author mentioned the punishments for those who had more than one child. One woman’s relatives were thrown into prison when she was seven months pregnant. They were denied food, threatened with torture and told that they would not be released until the woman had an abortion. She turned herself in and twenty-four hours after a doctor inserted a needle in her uterus, she delivered a dead fetus. Another woman had difficulty walking after a botched sterilization.
To read more about the facts and details of China’s one child policy visit: http://factsanddetails.com/china.php?itemid=128&catid=4&subcatid=15
So, the one child policy not only denies girls the right to live in some instances because boys are preferred but it denies a woman’s right to reproduce.
In India, the reason for aborting or abandoning baby girls was that the family could not afford to pay the dowry which was too expensive for them.
VIDEO: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-PRRZwWwbQA&feature=related
I watched a documentary called “India’s Missing Children”. One mother was neglecting her nutrition when she discovered that she was having a girl instead of a boy. Another woman decided that she was going to have an abortion. Her husband admitted that this was wrong but planned to go ahead with it anyway because they could not afford the dowry. They were thinking about the dowry before the child was even born. Another woman had about five abortions because none of the babies was a boy.
VIDEO: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YBUL4yWUs1w&feature=related
A grandmother was spotted abandoning her granddaughter by a worker at the orphanage which rescued these babies. They took the baby in and discovered that she was premature and that her lungs had not properly developed. She needed oxygen and fast! They showed this tiny baby in an incubator, her tiny chest heaving as she tried to get oxygen into her lungs. It was heart-wrenching.
It is a blessing that an orphanage is taking in these unwanted girls and caring for them but nothing can replace a mother’s love and acceptance. Mothers, I encourage you to let your daughters know how much you love and value them. Encourage, guide and teach your little girls so that they can grow up to be confident, industrious and productive women and find men worthy to be their husbands. Let them know that they can become whatever they want be so that when they go out into the world, they can hold their heads up high and believe in themselves.
Adele ends this sharing by suggesting to the Women of our World:
“Let them know that girls matter and can make a difference in this world.”
A Celebration of Women supports I Totally Matter!
Photo: http://www.itotallymatter.com/
A Celebration of Women
ADELE BUTLER – Women of Spirit: Girls Matter
January 1, 2012 by
