Friday, January 13, 2012

Unwanted Girls of India


Some time ago the Associated Press ran a deeply moving story about a name-changing ceremony in Mumbai, India. “More than 200 Indian girls whose names mean ‘unwanted’ in Hindi have chosen new names for a fresh start in life,” reports the AP’s Chaya Babu.

The ceremony—the brainchild of a district health official—came about as a response to a crisis in India. “The census showed the nation's sex ratio had dropped over the past decade from 927 girls for every 1,000 boys under the age of 6 to 914,” Babu writes. She goes on to explain that such ratios are the result of abortions of female fetuses, or just sheer neglect leading to a higher death rate among girls. The problem is so serious in India that hospitals are legally banned from revealing the gender of an unborn fetus in order to prevent sex-selective abortions, though evidence suggests the information gets out.

The fact that so many girls are killed before birth on the mere basis of their gender, and that those who do survive are often given names like “unwanted,” points to something deeply wrong with the culture’s view of women. In the renaming ceremony, the girls chose happy- or strong-sounding new names for them—names like Vaishali (“prosperous, beautiful, and good”) and Ashmita (“very tough”). Their choices demonstrate that this ceremony was a step toward changing that cultural paradigm—toward giving not just this one group of girls, but India itself, a fresh start.

When it comes to making children feel unwanted, though, India’s not the only country with a problem. The United States may not have as high a rate of sex-selection abortion, but unfortunately, we’ve been all too willing to fall for the lie that a child’s value is based solely on whether he or she is “wanted.” Who could forget former Surgeon General Joycelyn Elders’ desire, expressed in a magazine interview, that “every child born in America” be “a planned, wanted child,” as a way to cut the rates of crime and poverty? Her interviewer clearly understood this as a reference to abortion, as her very next question concerned abortion laws.

I’ve been haunted by those words ever since I first heard them, more than a decade ago. I’ve wondered, could Elders really have realized what she was saying? On the surface, the phrase can sound good, even noble: Let’s make every child feel wanted! But the flip side of that statement is almost unfathomably cruel: If a child isn’t wanted, then he or she shouldn’t be allowed to join the rest of the human race.

There’s a great deal of power in a name. Please pray that these girls would find their true worth in the name of Jesus Christ, which no one can take away.


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"Send me anywhere, only go with me. Lay any burden on me, only sustain me. Sever any tie, but the ties that bind me to your service and to your heart." --David Livingstone


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