Little girls dying
McGowan, Jo
LITTLE GIRLS DYING AN ANCIENT & THRIVING PRACTICE JO McGOWAN hen we named our adopted daughter Moy Moy, we only meant to name her after my adopted sister, who is Chinese. The name means...
...Several weeks later, she was born on the side of a road, twelve weeks premature, weighing in at two pounds...
...That translates into 232,000 missing baby girls...
...Couples will go on producing girl after girl in a desperate attempt to get a son...
...Her mother then decided on an abortion, but was persuaded by her obstetrician to carry on to term and give the baby up for adoption...
...But perhaps the realities of poverty enabled her a clearer vision than is generallly afforded to the privileged elite who are so fond of subtle nuances...
...The New York Times reported in June that perhaps 5 percent of all infant girls born in China are unaccounted for...
...Suppose she had lived...
...As in: Why did Elvis, amazingly, never perform outside the U.S...
...So instead of spending money and losing income, we prefer to deliver the child and kill it...
...In Elisabeth Bumiller's book May You Be the Mother of a Hundred Sons: A Journey Among the Women of India, one poor woman who had poisoned her daughter drew the obvious parallel between her action and those of wealthier women: "Abortion is costly...
...In India, the situation is no less grim...
...the girls and the women get what is left...
...The second time around, then, the stakes would be obviously even higher, the chances of a second daughter surviving very slight...
...The name Moy Moy or Mei Mei, with 9 August 1991:481 both its meanings, is frighteningly appropriate: to be a little sister means to have been saved from an early death...
...One of the main characters is called Mei-Mei...
...As another woman she interviewed put it, "Abortion at the fourth month is legally accepted in India...
...MeiMei, Mui-Mui...
...MEDIA THE GAMES WE PLAY DATA INTO DOLLARS y wife and I were having a quarrel about who was the most important figure in the early history of rock' n' roll: she said Chuck Berry, I said Elvis...
...When and if he finally appears, he is as precious as gold, while his sisters are less than sand...
...When we lived in Delhi, a poor man of our acquaintance came one day to ask us the name of a good doctor for his ailing son...
...With him to support them in their old age, they can look forward to a relatively peaceful retirement...
...Like rock, like the movies--indeed, like almost all distinctively twentieth-century art--TV is art only to the extent that it is also mass commodity: a producer's more than a performer's art...
...Finally, in 1986, the Chinese government, due in part to international censure, relented somewhat...
...In most families, the men and the boys eat first...
...Just as, by the bizarre mores at work in America today, a pregnant woman is assumed to have considered her"options," to have weighed and rejected abortion, so a Chinese woman bringing up a second daughter can be assumed to have considered and rejected infanticide...
...In 1982, the number of boys climbed to I09 and in 1983 to 111...
...I like to imagine her growing up, no longer Moy Moy, but Didi--the Hindi for elder sister--helping in some way to save the little girls whose small bodies--aborted, poisoned, starved, neglected, or worked to death--stand as evidence of how far we have to travel...
...He wanted the best, he said, and cost was no object...
...She was the fourteenth child of a mountain woman who had been sterilized after her thirteenth pregnancy...
...but as Marshall 482: Commonweal...
...That's Dick Clark of"American Bandstand...
...Then I read The Joy Luck Club by Amy Tan, a novel about Chinese-Americans in San Francisco...
...In the first place, it meets two optimal requirements for mass art: it's cheap and it fills a time slot...
...little sister" and "little girl dying" even more so...
...the name, the author explains, means "little sister...
...Somehow, this determined baby broke through fate and technology and was conceived...
...Wealthy women have their own, more acceptable way of dealing with unwanted baby girls: amniocentesis and abortion...
...If the newborn had the misfortune to be a girl, she was plunged into the bucket before she had a chance to draw her first breath...
...Until 1986, China's one-child policy was strictly enforced, putting many poor parents in the hideous position of weighing their own survival against their daughter's...
...Mui-Mui: little girl dying...
...It was better to save her from a lifetime of suffering...
...Mui Mui is exactly the way many Indians pronounce Moy Moy and Ravi's older relatives kept wondering aloud why we had chosen such an inauspicious name for our daughter...
...girls are allowed to languish for as long as possible...
...The hospital her parents left her in did not even have an incubator, but Moy Moy survived, flourished, and blossoms today, eighteen months later...
...But recently, I learned a bit more about the Chinese word which made me realize that China and India are not all that far apart...
...Boy babies are taken to the doctor early on in any illness...
...Bumiller, who wondered whether this woman could possibly believe there was no difference between abortion and infanticide...
...But you've got more: a perfect little parable of the Tube's morganatic marriage to the idea of "democracy...
...Little girls dying or saved from the grave...
...Instead of killing the child in the womb, I killed the child when it was born...
...I have more daughters than I can count," he said, "but only one son...
...We have only one Moy Moy and I thank God that this little sister was saved from her early death...
...So, from the inception of network TV in the late forties and through the fifties, canny men like Mark Goodson and Bill Todman, Jack Barry, Merv GrilTm, and our boy Dick Clark developed and perfected the game show...
...According to the 1990 census, little has changed...
...Without missing a beat or raising his eyes as he mixed a perfect perfect Rob Roy, Rocky said: "Dick Clark...
...What I learned concerned the Chinese name Mei-Mei, which is often given to a girl child saved from an early death...
...In Punjabi, his mother tongue, the word "mui" is the feminine for "dying one...
...Although anmiocentesis is now banned for sex-selection, in most cities it is still possible (often easy) to find a "doctor" willing to provide the service...
...Both in India and China, "little sister" and "girl saved from an early death" could very easily be the same thing...
...For the poor woman, things were more basic...
...A lifetime of suffering...
...If that is accepted, why can't I do this...
...So I took the question to Rocky, our archetypically gruff/wise neighborhood bartender...
...Which brings me to TV game shows...
...Although female infanticide was outlawed by the British in 1870, the practice continues...
...Suddenly, the whole thing became clear to me...
...I sat, stunned at the illumination...
...Although I suppose it isn't fair, it is tempting to think of this child as one who has been sent, someone with a mission and a preordained role...
...Most of the desperate peasants of China are none of these and many of them, apparently, kill their daughters...
...Girl babies die more than boy babies, in spite of long-standing medical evidence that the female is the stronger sex...
...A daughter, on the other hand, must be married off at great expense, at which point her financial contributions to her parents cease...
...Whatever the merits of her argument, it was clear that the motives of the poor woman were at least purer than those of her well-off sister, who could, after all, afford the dowry a daughter would require...
...But Moy Moy still meant "little sister," I assured myself...
...According to Bumiller, the reason the business class went in for sex-selective abortion was simply to "avoid the social embarrassment of having daughters but no sons...
...followed the expert/celeb format...
...To the Chinese peasant, the only social security system is the rearing of a productive son...
...I dismissed this as unfortunate but coincidental...
...Some early TV shows--preeminently, of course, "What's My Line...
...numbers were 108.5 to 100...
...A couple who chooses to bring up a girl as their only child is either financially independent, mad, or highly principled...
...In radio days, a lot of game shows featured panels of"experts" answering questions submitted by listeners, e.g., "Information, Please...
...Indeed, they are separated only by the Himalayas, where Moy Moy (coincidentally or not) is from...
...It's the Cantonese meaning that matters, I insisted...
...one asked Bumiller...
...The name means "little sister" in Cantonese, and since she was the youngest of our three, it seemed perfect...
...And you have to rest at home...
...For the price of a simple, reusable set and some prizes donated--free advertising--by name brands, you've got yourself a half-hour of signal (Dead Air, as Dan Rather will tell you, being the Sin for Which There Is No Forgiveness...
...In India, studies have consistently shown that to be a female is to be at risk...
...In both countries, female infanticide is an ancient and, in many areas, still thriving practice...
...In one South Indian district, according to the news magazine India Today in its cover story "Born to Die" (June 1986), an estimated 6,000 baby girls had been poisoned to death in the preceding ten years...
...After all, she's named after my Chinese sister...
...In China, according to Stephen Mosher, director of the Asian Studies Center at California's Claremont Institute, as late as 1980, village midwives were often instructed to "draw a bucket of water when a woman went into labor...
...And though its ancestry goes back to the days of radio, perhaps no variety of TV is more quintessentially TV than this apparently simple, surprisingly complex little life-form...
...The starkness of her words shocked Ms...
...Although the international demographic norm for the boygirl ratio is 106 boys to 100 girls, in China's 1981 census, the JO McGOWAN, a regular contributor to Commonweal, lives in India...
...Couples with "real difficulties" (i.e., a girl child) could apply for permission to try again...
...Because his manager, 'Col.' Tom Parker, was a Dutch citizen without passport, and was afraid they might not let him back in...
...Later, however, my husband (who is from India where we have lived for the past ten years) remembered something...
Vol. 118 • August 1991 • No. 14
