Couple Allegedly Dumps Twin Girls in Hopes of Having a Boy
Christine from The Passionate Ailurophile wrote that an older couple living in Britain went to India to have an IVF procedure, which resulted in twins. When the twin girls were born via C-Section, the parents reportedly told the hospital staff they didn’t want them and wondered when the mother would be fit to have another procedure to try for a boy. She says:
This is so wrong, in more ways than one. Last time I checked, there was always a 50/50 chance as to what gender a baby will be. If people want kids badly enough, they should be happy with whatever they get. The fact that they want a boy, and refuse to accept girls, makes me doubt that these assholes would be good parents.[Christine's source]
I have to agree. First, there are plenty of measures available for people who want to pick and choose the gender of their children. The first that comes to my mind is adoption, of course. There are plenty of young boys that are in need of good parents. But I understand for vanity reasons as well as family “honor” men of certain cultures (ours as well, no doubt) prefer children from their own seed. Fine. There is then ultrasound technology that can tell with almost 100% certainty what the sex of the babies is before their birth. The parents have options available to them at that point- either give the babies up for adoption or terminate the pregnancy.
As reprehensible as that sounds, the second option is and has been chosen by women worldwide for thousands of years.
The Daily Mail, though, reports that the story is false. New Cross Hospital in Wolverhampton denies that the twins were abandoned and, in fact, states that the parents are looking after the girls in a satisfactory manner. The story was first reported by the British tabloid, The Sun, Thursday May 29, 2008. However, The Daily Mail does report that twins, named Holly and Joseph, were abandoned in 2006.
In 2006, it was revealed a businesswoman dumped her new-born twins in a cardboard box in a hospital car park because they were the product of an affair.
The married 44 year old, who has three grown-up sons, said she could never reveal the truth of the twins’ birth to her family because of the devastation it would cause.[Emphasis mine]
The babies, born a month premature had to be put in incubators because they were so cold and were named Holly and Joseph by nurses.
Again, what the hell is wrong with people? Why would a woman go through with the pregnancy only to abandon her children? Did she not realize that she was pregnant with twins? I hope those babies found a loving mother to raise them. Preferably a mother who really wanted babies regardless of their gender.
This whole issue, though, brings to light another, related, problem facing girl children in India. The Daily Mail mentions that boys have a higher value among Indian families because girls cause too much of a financial hardship. So many parents use selective abortion or other means- sometimes even infanticide - to make sure that they don’t have any girls. The reasons for this are many. The International Center for Research on Women says [pdf][HTML version]:
Common wisdom is that the preference for sons is motivated by economic, religious, social and emotional desires and norms that favor males and make females less desirable: Parents expect sons—but not daughters—to provide financial and emotional care, especially in their old
age; sons add to family wealth and property while daughters drain it through dowries; sons continue the family lineage while daughters are married away to another household; sons perform important religious roles; and sons defend or exercise the family’s power while daughters have to be defended and protected, creating a perceived burden on the household.
The report goes on to say that education and media exposure are significant factors in whether a mother shows “Son Preference” or not. This simply means that a more educated and/or “worldly” woman is less likely to prefer a boy child and therefore less likely to have a selective abortion or kill her female children.
As recently as March an Indian mother reportedly killed her two daughters because she couldn’t stand the ridicule from her family members.
The continuous mental torture that she was subjected to by her husband and relatives for giving birth to two girls apparently prompted Seema Soi to kill them.
This is what the young mother told the police after being arrested for drowning two little girls in a reservoir in Belur Math last Tuesday. Sia was four years old and Ria was seven months old.
This woman went to great lengths to rid herself of the “torture” of having given birth twice to girls. To us, this is horrific. We wouldn’t imagine doing something like that to our children, but in parts of rural India women are faced with this decision every day. We know that it’s the biology of men that decides the gender of our children. The men provide the final chromosome (an “X” or a “Y”) that determines if our new additions are male or female. We’re lucky that way. These uneducated women are made to believe that giving birth to girls is their failure as women. They are punished for something they can’t biologically control. So they do things like kill their little girls and/or use selective abortions to make sure they don’t even give birth to them in the first place.
While the idea that a couple would go to extreme measures to get pregnant and then abandon their children because of their gender is abhorrent to us, in my opinion, that is a thousand times more humane that what other cultures expect from their women and what their women do to preserve the family “honor”. Even if these children were abandoned by their parents, they are lucky to have been born in Britain where infanticide is severely punished. As women, we need to think about what drives women in other countries to do these things and what we can possibly do to stop it.
From the ExpressIndia article:
According to eminent psychiatrist Aniruddha Deb, it is a case of murder-suicide psychology.
He said: “The society holds a woman responsible for giving birth to a girl. This creates a suicidal tendency in her. But the idea that no one else would care for the child pushes her to murder first. The age-old stigma associated with the birth of a girl ensures that such cases are reported again and again.” [Emphasis mine]
I have seen a lot of feminist howling about the mistreatment of Hillary Clinton (Sexism!!) during this primary season. I wish these same women would howl as loudly about real issues affecting women all over the world.
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