Obviously baby boys get killed as well.
But every time I come across a rather gruesome story about murdered children, or for that matter every time I read about a dead baby that has been found somewhere, I try to learn about the sex of the child. Often the newspapers don't report it, at least initially. When I first read about the very recent case in Germany about the babies in the freezer, nothing was said, initially, about the gender of the babies. Yesterday one Swedish newspaper wrote about the case again and mentioned, in passing, that the three babies were all girls. I started googling for articles in English about the case, which I could post here. However, all the articles I found at first were the kinds that didn't mention the dead babies' gender. I had to search for "baby girls in freezer" in order to find what I was looking for. And even then, the first hits I got still didn't mention the dead babies' sex, but instead said that a boy and a "girl" had found the babies, or that the suspected mother of the dead babies already had two boys and a "girl".
In most of the cases where small babies are killed, newspapers often don't mention whether the children are boys or girls, at least not on the first day, when the case usually gets the biggest headlines. As if the baby's gender doesn't matter too much. But my point is that it matters tremendously, because a newborn baby hasn't yet got a "personality". It hasn't got a "history". The mother doesn't yet know what it is like to take care of this child. All the mother really knows about the newborn baby is that it is a baby, and it is a girl - or it is a boy. If baby girls are killed more often than baby boys, that strongly suggests that more mothers are willing to kill a child only because it is a girl.
I looked up the Andrea Yates case. You can read about it
here. I think it is worth noticing, among other things, that Andrea Yates first had four sons. She suffered from severe depressions and other mental problems and tried to kill herself. But it was only after she had her first daughter that she turned her violence against her children and killed them, even if this didn't happen when her daughter was newborn.
There were no mitigating circumstances in the
Susan Smith case, as far as I can see. But I can say that my own sister-in-law very nearly became a witness when a Swedish mother drove her two small daughters into a lake in Sweden a few years ago. Both girls died. But the case received so little attention here in Sweden that I never read about it in the papers, and I only know of it because my sister-in-law told me.
I'm not saying that no mothers ever kill their sons. Things don't work like that. There are no gender absolutes. You can't say that there are no female school shooters or that there are no female pedophiles. That is simply not true. There are women who do all sorts of things, and there are men who do all sorts of things.
I'll keep insisting, however, that more newborn girls than newborn boys get killed by their mothers. I insist that more newborn girls than boys get killed, period. We know for a fact that it is like that if we consider the whole world. Huge numbers of girls are killed the two most populous countries in the world, China and India.
Female infanticide in India and China Infanticide, Abortion Responsible for 60 Million Girls Missing in Asia We in the West like to say to ourselves that we are not like that, but we don't take a hard look at ourselves to see if our self-satisfied assumptions are true or not. What will happen the day scientists come up with an easy way for parents to decide even before conception if their baby will be a boy or a girl? Will boys and girls still be born in more or less equal numbers? And what will happen if significantly more parents want boys rather than girls, and girls become a "natural resource" in short supply? Today we already have a situation where women and children, mostly girl children, are being traded like goods. Large numbers of women, mostly from poorer countries in eastern Europe and from Asia and Africa, are being brought to western Europe to be forced into prostitution. I saw a documentary from China about the lucrative slave trade of women there. Girls and young women are kidnapped and sold as wives to the growing number of men who can't get a wife any other way, because of the increasing shortage of young women in China.
It drives me crazy that no one talks about these things, that's all. I'm not trying to say that each and every woman would rather have sons than daughters, believe me. I know that is not true. Believe me, I, too, have heard expectant mothers say, "I hope it is a girl". I don't doubt for a moment that most mothers here in the West are happy about the children they get, whether they are boys or girls. I'm just saying that one day parents will get the chance to choose the gender of their children even before the woman has become pregnant in the first place. What will happen then? Will most parents still be happy to let nature choose the sex of their child? Will a significant number of parents decide to choose their baby's gender for themselves? And will we still get an equal number of boys and girls when parents can "shop" for the sex of their child? And if we no longer get an equal number of boys and girls in our societies, how will that affect our lives?
Ann
