Cao Qulin went into labor last Saturday, which was nine days before her due date. She went to the toilet before reaching the hospital and, unexpectedly, gave birth into the toilet. Her husband called the police. The Chouyang Fire Brigade explained what happened next. “The rescuers could see the baby and hear her crying sometimes in the pit. They broke the pits by hand so they could reach the baby without endangering her.”
The baby has been released from the hospital and is in good condition now. Healthcare authorities in China say that, while delivering a baby in a toilet is unusual, it is much more common with women who have had multiple children. Large families, however, are not common in China, which has adopted a “one child” policy and enforced that by draconian methods.
The prevalence of gender-specific abortions in China (as well as in other Asian nations) makes the survival of this baby girl even more miraculous. In the normal course of things, there are slightly more boys born than girls — the ratio is 105 boys for every 100 girls. Boys are slightly more prone to medical problems, and the infant mortality rate for boys is marginally higher than for girls. So, in a society that lets God and nature take their course, the male-female ratio would be about the same. Advances in medicine favor women as people get older, so the population of senior citizens is disproportionately female.
In China, however, and in other nations in which boys are considered more valuable than girls, parents disproportionately choose a boy as their first child. And this is made more pronounced by the “one child” policy in China. In some Chinese provinces, the ratio of births is seriously unbalanced: 130 boys born for every 100 girls born in Henan and Hainan, for example. This has resulted in about 32 million more males under the age of 20 in China than girls 20 or younger.
Another factor has been the general decrease of pregnancy and birth in Asian and African nations, as the overall rise in the health of children has made parents less inclined to produce large families, in which in the past a significant percentage of the children could be expected to die before reaching adulthood.
What is curious in China, however, is that the sex selection of males is not taking place among the poor and rural populations so much as it is among the relatively affluent and educated couples in urban areas. Mothers, as much as fathers, want to have a son more than a daughter, and the issue is as much social status as health or wealth. Feminists, who ironically have been the principle champions of abortion on demand, are beginning to take notice. The gender imbalance in Asia, if it continues, will create a substantially lopsided male population on the continent in which most people in the world live.
The same trend is beginning to appear in the United States. Lifenews reported on April 6 of this year that the Asian population in California was already showing up in BGRs (Birth Gender Ratios) with a strong preference for boys.
G. Sharat Lin, a researcher who has studied the patterns in California, states: “Breaking it down by ethnic groups is showing us that this is not simply noise or some kind of random fluctuation. These are showing up where we would expect them, in the ethnic groups where there is a cultural preference for boys.”
Pro-life groups have supported legislation that would make performing or financing sex-selection or race-selection abortions illegal. Father Shenan Boquet, the president of Human Life International, supports the bills, saying: “While we should strive to end abortion in all circumstance, this legislation is an important and welcome step. Every human life is sacred, but to specifically target the unborn based on race or gender for destruction magnifies the inherit evil of abortion, and fosters an even greater prejudice toward life.”
Cao Qulin, when her newborn girl went into the toilet, reacted like any good mother, and this tiny new soul in our world is blessed to have parents who view her as a blessing, regardless of gender. The tragic gendercide of millions of other unborn girls, however, continues, helped by those feminists who view a “woman’s right to choose” above a “girl’s right to live.”
