Gendercide - Real or Imagined?

What is gendercide? It is killing someone based on their gender. Simple, right? Yes. Totally horrible, right? Yes. Not an issue today, right? Wrong. Gendercide is a serious issue that most people don't seem to realize is there. We don't hear about it much in the US, but it's definitely happening. This goes back to abortion and child welfare. Sorry for repetition.

I love diverse cultures. I love studying them, learning their customs, eating their food (especially eating their food.). But there is in some cultures a dated and incorrect practice - devaluing women and girls as burdens to the family. Girls are unwanted. The cultures require a dowry to be paid to the man that marries the daughter of the family. They place financial stress on a already struggling family. "A study of a Mumbai (Bombay) clinic found that 7,999 out of 8,000 aborted [children] were female. In families where food is scarce, girls ages 1-5 were 43% more likely than boys to die of hunger or malnutrition, according to another study," (James M. Rubenstein). While girls create a burden, boys create opportunity for financial gain. They can get higher paying work, as well as marry for a dowry. It is an awful practice that must be stopped.

Abortion. Giving the child lowest priority when it comes to eating. Abandoning babies. Having sex change operations when the child is an infant. WHAT KIND OF WORLD IS THIS?? It is the world we live in. Gendercide is a real problem. We should not ignore this as an "imagined crisis" or a "cultural custom". It is evil. We are looking for the Lost Girls that will never be found. Life is precious. We cannot afford to treat it like it is something that we can recycle.

A lack of women leads to another problem. Sex trafficking becomes more and more prevalent as the gender ratio difference gets larger and larger. We're talking about kidnapping and selling GIRLS into prostitution! This is all linked to the idea that we are smarter than we really are. That we can bend the laws of nature, limiting each couple to one child. I guess they forgot about the cultural variable in their equation. We are HUMANS. We are not all-knowing (even if some of us seem to think so). Let's please STOP trying to control the minuet details in other people's lives. It isn't only that it's girls that they're killling. It's that they are taking AGENCY and the FREEDOM TO CHOOSE from both the child they are killing and the parents they are regulating. This comes down to human rights. What has God given us as humans. Even if you don't believe in God, is slavery wrong? Is murder wrong? Is torture wrong? In forcing abortions/sterilization on those women who WANT to have more than one child, they are committing every one of these crimes.

All Girls Allowed is a foundation that is focusing on ending the gendercide caused by the One-Child Policy in China.

http://www.youtube.com/user/AllGirlsAllowed?feature=watch#p/u/1/OScOV2MPZiM

This is what I mean about being "pro-life". It's not just about abortion. It's about defending LIFE, physical and spiritual, from whatever may attempt to destroy it.

Think about it.

Overpopulation - a Thought.

I'm taking two classes this year that are actually very similar: AP Environmental Science and AP Human Geography. APES is an applied science, focusing on how we USE biology, chemistry, and geology in our interactions with the environment. AP HuG is not as much physical geography, but where people are in relation to each other, the study of culture and the impact it has on our use of land/resources and interactions with one another. I'm not normally a science person, but I am a government person. I am LOVING these classes! I basically am learning the science behind the policy issues we hear about all the time, like poverty, pollution, water use, energy, language, religion, terrorism, and population. It's SO COOL! (And it makes learning about biogeochemical cycles more bearable. Seriously, "bio"-"geo"-"chemical"... That includes EVERYTHING! Geez.) What I'm thinking about right now is a sensitive issue, as we just reached another mile stone- 7,000,000,000. Yup. I'm talking about population growth.

Here's a cool video by National Geographic about Baby 7 Billion.

Now, you all know I'm a pro-lifer, but I'm also a skeptic. I can't take information at face value. There is more to the story. (That's another reason why I love history.) Malthus' theory of population growth is no different. Thomas Malthus was alive at the time of English Industrial Revolution, and he saw the growing difference between the rich and poor. He also saw cities that were crowded and DIRTY. The death rate was falling while the birth rate was remaining high. His thought was that it would continue that way until there was not enough food for everyone on earth. Well, he was right to be concerned, but here is a video of the Demographic Transition Model. Malthus was alive in Stage 2 Britain. Today, most developed countries are in Stage 4/Stage 5. Malthus took a good guess, but he wasn't as good of a fortune-teller as he thought the world would be out of food by 1890.

Here is a video by the Population Research Institute about our global growth rate. They've got one of these good news/bad news deals. Good news: we are not going to run out of resources due to OVERpopulation. Bad news: in 25 years, our population with peak, and by the end of the century, we will be to losing 1 billion people every 20 YEARS! Wow! With individuals living longer lives AND our growth rate shrinking, we cannot afford to lose the most valuable resource - human lives. We will end up with more adults that are unable to work than young people able to support them.

If our world CAN support all of us, then why is there hunger? Again, the PRI made a great video about both hunger and poverty. I hope that we can try our best to solve REAL problems, not imagined ones. Can we please build infrastructure and reduce conflicts to insure the access of food? Can we not give government handouts, but provide job training to those in poverty? The "Overpopulation Theory" is a form of eugenics - "There needs to be less of YOU so there can be more FOR me."

This also gets into the issue of women's rights. Does she have the right to have children? Does she have the right to have girl babies? Does she have the right to be here at all? But I'll save this discussion for another post. (Now you're all dying to know where I'm going with this, aren't you?)

We've got a lot of problems on this world, but overpopulation isn't one of them. But, greed, abortion, war, and lack of mature discussion are.


Think about it.