Because the Old Testament does not allow fathers to kill their sons. It is far less obvious that it forbids fathers to kill their daughters.
OK, now I am not religious, and most of what I learned about the Bible and religious teachings in my youth has been forgotten. So if I step on someone's toes here, please forgive me.
The events as related in the Bible took place thousands and thousands of years ago. They were passed along from generation to generation before man developed an efficient means of writing them down physically. The society as described in the Bible was very different from Western society today, and there were no concerns about being politically correct. Women were treated like chattel because that's the way most men viewed them. We can debate now whether it was right or wrong, but that is simply the way it was, and nothing that we do or say can change it.
And although this is no longer the case in most Western societies, we know that in some parts of the world women are still considered to have less value than men. I don't argue with that, Ann, but despite the many posts you have made on this subject you have failed to convince me that this is a prevalent concern in Western society. And as to your perceived preference of boys over girls, I don't believe that people in the U.S. or Canada (I mention those since those are the two cultures I know best), for example, view baby girls less favorably than boys because they read about and were thus influenced by similar instances in the Bible.
Ann, you bring up various cases to prove your point, and I understand that you feel very strongly about this, but to me your viewpoint is skewed by your very strong bias about female oppression. Unless I see hard statistics drawn from a much broader spectrum that support your belief, I am unwilling to draw the same conclusions as you do from such a small sampling.
You cite 13 out of 15 abandoned/killed babies being girls, but that's just in the examples you've given. How many more out there are there over the past however many years? How many more instances - boys or girls - that you haven't researched? I have no idea, and I'm afraid that I'm unwilling to do any research on the subject, because I find the entire topic of abandoned/killed babies/children upsetting in the extreme, period, no matter what the gender of the child is. It may be the first piece of information that you seek out, but not me. I'm just horrified to hear of it happening, regardless of the circumstances. And I realize that I only know a microscopically small sample of Western society, but of everyone I know with children, those children are adored by their parents, be they male or female.
And to quote from one of the links that you yourself posted -
BBC: Facts about female infanticide - it says:
Female infanticide is a significant problem in parts of Asia - infanticide does occur in the West, but usually as isolated family tragedies with no underlying pattern or gender bias.
Kathy
