If there is a promise I have made myself, it is not to make value judgments on other cultures and customs that seem barbaric or heinous. Dave's recent post about Legitimate cultural difference or barbaric rite provided some very good heuristics - namely the one about physical mutilation of a child being wrong.
Now I don't see how the culturally-sanctioned practice of female foeticide in both India and China is any less worse than physical mutilation of a child, so I make no apologies for my trenchant castigation (and reneging this once on my promise). In this instance it is India that caught my attention, thanks (somewhat reluctantly) to a friend who pointed me to this article about India's Missing Girls in the Guardian and an eponymous documentary on Youtube, which I refused to watch, saying it would depress not enrich me.
India and China are now Asia's economic powerhouses and look set to be superpowers in the coming century. Sadly prosperity has not brought about much progress where the rights and status of females are concerned. Millions of female foetuses are discarded as if they were trash, which to their cultures they are. Sometimes it is hard for my Western-trained mind to comprehend how callously a life can be discarded solely on the basis of its gender.
This is nothing new; being a female and Chinese I can attest that sons are still preferred, however subtly, over daughters. I can be rather trenchant and sardonic when irked, and for some reason the article irked me greatly. It could also be that education made no difference - the husband of a highly-educated Indian lady made her go through FIVE abortions, all because the foetuses were female, and would keep her aborting until the foetus was male.
I made rather wickedly incisive remarks (every single one of them painfully true) regarding the collective intelligence and future of said nations if they didn't stop to THINK that, you know, females are needed in order to bear the sons they so desire.
Prosperity seems to have compounded this horrendous problem and education seems to have done nothing by way of enlightenment. No matter how wealthy and powerful India and China think they are or will be, the fact remains that their cultures condone, whether implicitly or explicitly, the mass murder of its own flesh and blood.
Young Indian and Chinese men will not have local girls from which to choose their brides, and this leads to all manners of social ills. The future for these nations will be dystopic unless they can somehow do a 360 where their cultural values are concerned.
Until then, I can find no other description for mass female foeticide than barbaric...and yes, that is a judgment and a condemnation. There is hardly a civilised nation on the face of this earth which does not exact severe penalties for the murder of a human life - are female foetuses and infants any less human?
Photograph: Gurinder Osan/AP