The Economist writes:
...It is no exaggeration to call this gendercide. Women are missing in their millions—aborted, killed, neglected to death...
From Times Online(2007) :
50m: number of girls that Unicef estimates are ‘missing’ from Indian society
1.05: males to every female in India, reversing the world average
600: rupees now, save 50,000 rupees later” is the advertising slogan of diagnostic teams with ultrasound machines that predict the sex of the unborn child
Neptunes Lex :
Between the two of them, China and India are raising a cohort of some hundred million men who will never know the civilizing, rooting influence of marriage...
Cheryl Cline comments:
Religion sociologist Rodney Stark has studied the link between female infanticide and the rise of the Christian church. Unfortunately gendercide is hardly a new phenomenon, as the history of pagan Rome shows. Stark believes that Christianity, which prohibits femicide, led to the collapse of pagan Rome through sheer force of numbers:
"Abortion was a huge killer of women in this period, but Christian women were spared that. And infanticide—pagans killed little girls left and right. We’ve unearthed sewers clogged with the bones of newborn girls. But Christians prohibited this. Consequently, the sex ratio changed and Christians didn’t have the enormous shortage of women that plagued the rest of the empire."
( A Double Take on Early Christianity: An Interview with Rodney Stark)
Of course, The Economist recommends implicitly state-driven solutions: “female education, anti-discrimination suits and equal-rights rulings.” South Korea has actually been educating women for decades, so that seems a moot point, and I have a surprisingly difficult time understanding how dead female fetuses and infants launch anti-discrimination and equal-rights suits. The day a magazine like The Economist calls for widespread institution of Christianity to save baby girls, or otherwise recommend that we examine politically incorrect religious trends, please let me know.
I'd like to know why its news. Really. How were people expecting the 'one-child policy' to turn out, for example? (Didn't care, as long as there were fewer Chinese?!)
Christianity alone respects women in a meaningful way, as it respects all human life. Created by God and made in His image, made sacred by the Incarnation, human life - male and female - is valuable. Because God made it so.
No-one else has as good a reason to value human life!
