China Offers Families Money to Have Girl Babies Instead of Abortions
by Steven Ertelt
LifeNews.com Editor
August 12, 2004
Beijing, China (LifeNews.com) — China’s population control program of forced abortions and sterilizations has caused an epidemic of familles seeking to give birth to a baby boy. Sensing that this trend needs to be reversed, government officials are instituting a new program paying couples to have female babies.
According to the Chinese government, about 117 boys are born for every 100 girls. In most industrialized countries the numbers are much closer to parity.
In an effort to tackle the growing gender imbalance, China will offer free schooling and better housing for families with girls. Families with girls will also be given preferential treatment in welfare allowances and employment.
The China Daily newspaper reports that family planning officials want its Care for Girls pilot program to bring the ratio down to between 103 to 107 boys born for ever 100 girls.
In Chinese culture, boys have traditionally been more valued than girls — especially in rural areas. Boys are expected to do much of the work, especially farming, and inherit land and property from their fathers.
But it wasn’t until the adoption of the one-child policy — when population control officials began forcing familles to have abortions or sterilizations and jailing of burning down the houses of dissenters — that Chinese families began to kill girl babies.
"China’s notorious one-child policy has been a death sentence for a whole generation of girls," notes Stephen Mosher, President of the Population Research Institute.
"Since the beginning of the one-child policy in 1981, well over a hundred million baby girls in China have died by abortion, infanticide, abandonment, and neglect," explains Mosher.
"Many were selectively aborted after ultrasound machines revealed their sex," Mosher adds. "Others were given lethal injections in the fontanel — or soft spot — as they descended in the birth canal."
The gender imbalance problem has also created a "bachelor society" where men are having problems finding wives. That has led to a rise in kidnapping of women and forcing them into sexual slavery.
Mosher said female infants have been drowned or smothered as they emerged from the womb, before they had a chance to draw their first breath.
Related Sites:
Population Research Institute – http://www.pop.org
