It's a Girl! Page #6

her at first.

At the time, I thought I just

needed to sign my name.

It is just an adoption, why

not?

I did not think too much.

The more I thought about

it and asked people,

the harder the decision became.

My family and friends said,

you don't have a high salary,

you don't have a boyfriend

yet, and your parents are old,

your mom has health problems

and she doesn't have a job.

If you sign the papers, you can't

even have your own child!

It will bring you trouble

and make it more difficult

to find a husband!

Even my mom would often say a son

can take care of you when they are old.

Daughters are water poured out.

These are our local idioms.

After you get married you

belong to your husband's family,

no longer a member of

our family.

So when a woman gets married,

her family loses a member.

This is how people think.

My mom told me these things before,

but she doesn't believe in these values.

When she picked Meihui up,

she didn't think about

it's a boy or girl.

She just felt compassion for

her and brought her home.

Because it's a girl.

If it was a boy, they would

not have abandoned her,

they would have kept it.

This baby exceeds the

birth limit, and it's a girl,

that's why they abandoned

it and didn't want it.

I heard that there's a family

in Yuxi village who had a girl.

They killed it on the doorsill.

It's too horrifying!

No one wants girls.

Some people would regard

allowing two children

instead of one child

as being a solution to

the One-Child policy.

That is not a solution.

The issue is not how

many children

the government allows

a woman to have.

The issue is the coercion with

which they enforce the number.

So whether it's one child

or two children,

a woman is still going to have

to have a pregnancy permit,

and a birth permit

to have that child.

Whether it's their first

child or their second child,

or they may be subject

to forced abortion.

Just reversing the One-Child policy

will only mitigate the problem,

but the long-term solution

is for some parents

to be okay with

not having a son.

Chinese need to forsake Confucius

son-preference culture

and embrace the fact that

girls are as good as boys

and women are as

valuable as men.

Son preference comes from

cultures that devalue women.

They feel that women are

just not as good as men.

And women have been beaten

down by these cultures;

and these cultures have been devaluing

women for thousands of years,

can't always stand up

for themselves.

And that's why women who come

from cultures that value women,

where women are equal,

we need to stand

up for our sisters

because they cannot stand

up for themselves.

It is a violation of human rights

when babies are denied food

or drowned or suffocated

or their spines broken simply

because they are born girls.

It is a violation of

human rights

when women are doused

with gasoline,

set on fire and burned to death

because their marriage dowries

are deemed too small.

It is a violation of

human rights

when women are denied the right

to plan their own families;

and that includes being

forced to have abortions

or being sterilized against

their will.

If there is one message that echoes

forth from this conference,

let it be that human

rights are women's rights

and women's rights

are human rights -

once and for all.

Sadly, since this address

in 1995,

very little has been done

either socially or politically

to stop gendercide

around the world.

The right to life is what

defines us as humans.

That as a human being your

most fundamental right

is the right to life

and existence.

And it's unconditional;

you don't ever justify why

someone has the right to live,

like we do now with women.

So there are sites that say,

oh, but if you kill women,

who will have the babies?

Well, like I said before,

that I've argued -

does that mean that you kill women

who don't want to have babies?

Women are so beautiful, why

do you want to kill them?

Well, if they are ugly

do you then kill them?

The right to life is an

uncontested right.

But the fact that we have to justify

why women shouldn't be killed -

that is a dehumanizing

argument in itself.

So I think that... somewhere

there has been a huge shift

in the female genocide from

the human's rights basis.

So we are treating

women like pandas

or any other wildlife animal

that is going extinct

and that we should raise

for the conservation.

So when you say something,

like you show a picture

of a little girl

and you say save the girl child

and you have many people

say, yes, save the girl child,

who are we addressing?

Who are we talking to?

Who is going to

save the girl child

and whom are you going to

save the girl child from?

You do not get to this scale

without much of the population

being involved in some way.

Either it's happening in the

families in terms of feticide,

dowry violence,

or they're involved in

the police or courts,

or their turning a blind eye

when it happens in

their neighbors house

Everybody is involved,

perpetuating a system,

turning a blind eye,

aligning for it to continue.

So it is when you say,

"Save the girl child,"

nobody is listening.

Who's listening?

When you turn the

mirror around

and unless we take a good,

hard look into our psyche,

into our moral conscience and

you realize that as a nation

we have need for examination,

for shame and for change,

for actually confronting

it within ourselves,

nothing is going to change.

There needs to be an assumption

of responsibility,

that there is something that we

have allowed to go horribly wrong

and we are each

responsible for it.

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