India's Shame: 30 Bags Found Stuffed with the Bodies of Female Babies and Fetuses
This is the price paid when we reject human exceptionalism and its necessary corollary, universal human equality--in this case between females and males. From the awful story in the Telegraph:
Thirty polythene bags stuffed with the remains of female foetuses and newly born babies have been found in a dry well near a private clinic in the east Indian state of Orissa, police said yesterday.India's cultural pogrom against girls is reaching holocaust proportions:
Police suspect that the remains were dumped in the well shortly after birth or abortion at the clinic in Nayagarh district, 55 miles southwest of the state capital, Bhubaneswar. The manager of the clinic has been arrested...
Despite laws banning sex determination tests, the killing of female foetuses is still common in India, where the preference for sons runs deep. Infanticide is also practised in some areas. The government has said that around 10 million girls have been killed by their parents--either before or immediately after birth--during the last 20 years. (My emphasis.)I know the government is trying to stop this slaughter--but clearly not hard enough. And cultures change slowly. But there is no excuse whatsoever for this kind of carnage. Clearly, a crackdown is in order. Otherwise, the definition of genocide will have to be expanded to include mass extermination based on sex.
posted by Wesley J. Smith @ 7:34 PM
5 Comments
5 Comments:
I read about it on the bbc.uk.co. It is tragic indeed.
It would be interesting to find out the perpetrators' religious beliefs. I wonder if it is only Hindus doing this, or if this is some type of Indian superstition that has wide spread among the different religions of the Indian continent (e.g.Muslim, Hinduis, and Buddhism).
-EI
Wesley,
In Forced Exit, you discuss how hunter gather societies would discard "unproductive" members of society, such as deformed babies and the infirmed. You contrast those to modern euthanasia of the unproductive in the sense that with the ancient times, it was out of necessity whereas in modern times it's out of convenience.
Is that a fair summary?
So, for these societies that do gender-selective abortions, could the same be said? If I'm not mistaken, I believe these gender-focused abortions are more prevalent in small villages in China and India, as opposed to the big cities.
So, would it matter that if in the minds of these villagers, that they believed these abortions were necessary for their own survival? Given a patriarchal inheritance pattern, survivability might very well depend on raising boys and not girls.
As a nutshell, it is a fair summary, but without any implication that I approved of leaving the lame at the side of the trail or exposing infants on hills.
I think there is a huge difference. First, there were times when the tribe itself literally would have been materially imperilled, for example, by not being able to follow the herds due to infirm members. That is not the case here at all. The families would not be put in literally in peril if a girl was born. They might be out money for a dowry. Life might be tougher. Realizing that this could be burdensome, it does not justify killing. Nor do unjustifiable distinctions in moral worth based on sex.
I realize there are cultural issues at play here, which is why the government has to convince people to stop this-with both carrots and sticks.
Hell, I think exposing defective infants on hills in Roman days was pure evil.
There would be fewer tragedies like this if the Catholic church didn't oppose contraception in 3rd world countries so vehemently.
Typical, why does the above reader blame the Catholic Church !
It has it's fauolts sure, but thri world countries, if they are so religious, would also abide by the churches teaching of 'Thous Shalt Not kill.." !
It's nothing to do with contraception, but the culture which believes males are more important than girls, so when they try for a baby, if it's a girl they kill her until they have a boy. My dad says they always do this, and in his youth he said it happened just as much but they induced abortions by eating some poisonous food, and then threw the baby foetus out to the chickens to eat on their farms !
Besides, these people are Hindus, not Catholic !
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