"This Indian woman has killed eight of her baby girls." "I just strangled it soon after it was born." "Why keep girls when raising them would be difficult?" "She would get pregnant in the hopes of having a son." "But each time she'd deliver a daughter instead and each time she'd kill the baby because she did not want a daughter." "She wanted a son." "I felt we could keep it only if it was a male, and kill it if it was a female child." "I would kill it and bury it." "Women have the power to give life and the power to take it away." "Sadly, this woman's story is not unique." "In many nations, particularly India and China, the three most dangerous words heard at the birth of a child are:" ""It's a Girl."" "Around the world, the average gender ratio is 105 boys for every 100 girls born." "But in certain regions in India and China, that ratio is as high as 140 boys to every 100 girls." "And each year, that ratio skews more and more toward boys as fewer and fewer girls are born." "What is causing this tremendous shift in the two most populated nations on earth?" "In India and China, most families prefer sons to daughters." "Their cultures and traditions have instilled in them a belief that sons bring strength, blessing and wealth to the family." "Daughters do not." "In fact, daughters in these cultures are typically considered drains on families and their resources." "For instance, in India, a daughter's family is usually expected to pay an expensive dowry of property and money to the husband's family." "Families with sons gain wealth and daughters-in-law." "Families with daughters lose both their wealth to dowry, and their daughters." "This cultural preference for sons has led many families to rid themselves of female children." "Baby girls are frequently aborted, killed immediately after birth, or abandoned." "Those daughters that do live, though, often become victims of neglect and abuse." "This mass extermination of female children... this gendercide ... is the direct result of cultures which place a high value on the lives of boys and a low value on the lives of girls." "In our homes and orphanages, many children, they are handed over by their own parents." "Generally, poor parents, they do not like to have female children." "Glory Dass runs several orphanages in Southern India." "Many of the girls in his homes were abandoned by families who did not want daughters." "The parents, even sometimes they don't have feeling of sad when they kill their babies, because what they think, within a minute the child can die instead of the child struggling and dying day by day," "every day in the poverty." "What they think, they want to in a minute to kill their baby." "It was due to meager income..." "When there is no income, nothing can be done." "No earnings of a male member." "Again, me alone struggling with my own earnings, it was not possible to manage the family." "Mariamall, she said, she don't feel anything bad, that she killed her baby many years back, because now she is struggling by poverty, and lots of ups and downs in her family." "So she feels if the baby were still alive, she would have suffered very much." "It was because of dowry." "Our men can't make enough money to meet high costs of living." "It is difficult to provide jewelry for marriage" "With income so low, it is even difficult to manage for food." "What they generally do, they just wet the cloth, and they fold it like this, and they put it on the face, so the child can't breathe." "Immediately the child will die." "This is an entire system, a social machinery, that says," ""We don't want females."" "The killing of females is actually systemic." "That... it is not just before birth, but it's also after birth, and different stages of birth." "There's a huge amount of female infanticide." "Girls under the age of five, five and under, have a very high mortality rate." "Either they don't get food, or if they're sick, they don't want to spend on medicine." "It is negligent homicide." "They are just allowed to die, in a way that boys are not allowed to die." "In India today, the devaluation of women and girls is widespread." "Because of factors like female feticide, female infanticide, abuse and neglect, one out of four girls does not live past puberty." "The mortality rates for girls between the ages of one and five are 40% higher than those of boys." "Why are some of the Indian households secretly and brutally eliminating daughters from their family system?" "Are Indians hating women?" "They like daughter in-laws, but they don't like daughters." "A responsibility to take care of the parents is on the male child." "It's also that the male child is supposed to perform the last rites." "This is also a system of patriarchy, and so the family property, family tradition, family responsibilities are to be shared by and carried forward by the son;" "whereas the daughter, after getting married, gets nearly disconnected with her parental family, except in times of emergency." "So a grownup daughter is literally no good, so far as family's wealth system is concerned, family's requirements are concerned, family's challenges are concerned." "And this makes Indian people have son preference and daughter avoidance." "According to one UN estimate, there are up to 200 million missing women in the world today due to gendercide." "Today, India and China eliminate more girls than the number of girls born in America every year." "Genocide is the deliberate, systematic destruction of a racial, ethnic, or religious group." "Gendercide is the deliberate, systematic destruction of a gender group" " Usually girls." "Can you tell me what were the methods you used to kill children?" "By pouring acid to suffocate... sometimes by strangulation." "So they crush the neck, or they put the wet cloth on the face." "Sometimes they put some rice, the child will die." "Sometimes they give poison, some drops of poison in the milk." "There are some special plants, if they take the milk from that plant, the child will die." "We just came down to Haryana to one of our projects to have a meeting with the local community here." "This was arranged by our Field Coordinator." "And in this meeting we discussed various topics of female feticide, of dowry, of equality of girl child and boy child." "What is it to us if it is a boy or girl?" "We have to end the dowry system." "This is mostly a problem with our men that we have to solve." "Dowry system is one of the main problems for female feticide." "It is because of this that girls are considered a burden." "All the women said that boys and girls are equal, and we don't have anything against girls and boys, it's more our men who force us to have a male child." "Although there was a hidden tone in which everybody said that once you have a girl child, please do not kill them, and it's completely incorrect to do infanticide." "But, on the other hand, they were also talking about not to have a girl child." "So in a hidden tone, they were supporting female feticide, and commenting about, once you have a child, then you should not kill them." "But your first child - and everybody had the same answer - has to be a boy." "Because you wish for a boy, as he will make sure your family lineage continues." "He'll make sure the property of the family remains in the family, and he'll make sure the daughters, his sisters, will be in safe hands." "Dressed up with flowers on the head, wearing all gold jewels, you got me married." "But I stand here with tears in my eyes." "One caste, one blood and one relationship could not be, so you gave me away in marriage." "You did not see their blood and relationship?" "But I stand here with tears in my eyes." "Being brought up with so much love, this girl in this awful crowd." "I am stuck and I am struggling." "Is there no way out of this pain?" "In India, as girls grow up into women, their plight does not improve." "More than 100,000 are murdered each year because they fail to produce sons or because their new husbands or in-laws are not satisfied with the dowry they've received." "In 1961, the Indian government outlawed dowry to prevent such crimes, yet the practice still remains common today." "And a majority of dowry-related crimes are never investigated or prosecuted." "Maya and Raju had four children - all of them daughters." "I just concentrated on my four daughters and I prayed to God that they would have no difficulties." "We were very happy with our daughters... more than we would have been with a son." "As their eldest daughter, Latika, got older, her parents worried she wouldn't find a man to marry." "Then we showed her this man." "She kept saying she didn't like him, but I insisted." "My daughter used to say," ""You are treating me as a burden."" ""You want to get rid of me."" "After the man agreed to marry Latika," "Maya and Raju collected what they could to put together as a dowry." "And so Latika and the man were married." "Soon Latika got pregnant and gave birth to a baby girl." "This made Latika happy, but upset her husband." "Latika's husband frequently drank too much and would abuse her." "Latika though, not wanting to worry her parents, didn't tell them about the abuse." "Then, one day, Maya and Raju received word that Latika was in the hospital." "The in-laws said her condition was very serious and she can't speak." "I knew they were hiding something, and I started crying because I didn't know what else to do." "By the time Maya and Raju made it to the hospital, it was too late." "Latika was dead." "When we saw her, my wife saw the mark on her neck." "We realized she was dead." "We started crying and wailing." "We lost our senses;" "we didn't know how can he kill her." "They told us a lie and they cheated us." "We sold half our land and we gave them so many gifts." "Latika's husband had claimed she had hung herself." "But Maya and Raju didn't believe him." "The police arrested Latika's husband for the killing of his wife in what is known as a dowry death." "But after a few weeks, they let him go." "In India, courts frequently ignore dowry deaths and other crimes against women." "Now Maya and Raju worry about Latika's baby girl - their granddaughter." "They worry for her safety, living with the man who killed Latika." "Homes where there is tremendous violence inflicted on women, are the same homes where violence is killing girls of five and under at an abnormal rate." "So it is like the female becomes one of the inadvertent pawns in this resource exchange, in a patriarchy." "So you can buy her, sell her, keep her or kill her, however you want." "It's like with any resource, so that is the complete dehumanization of females." "Dowry and infanticide and feticide go hand in hand." "The minute dowry enters a community everyone becomes greedy for dowry." "They think this is another way of getting huge amounts of money." "And they demand huge amounts in dowry." "And if they're entitled to get dowry, then they have to give dowry as well." "So that becomes reason not to have girls and daughters." "And so that doesn't matter whether you are very poor, or you're very rich in India." "That same logic applies." "If you're very rich, you're getting foreign BMW's and Mercedes in dowry, but you have to give that also in dowry." "So the logic for why feticide and infanticide are occurring today are actually more..." "It is really greed-based." "It is not based on economic necessity." "It is greed-based, it's every son is one way of getting money in, and every daughter less is less outflow of money from within a family." "Poor families who want to avoid paying expensive dowries frequently kill or abandon their newborn daughters." "Wealthier families use ultrasound machines to learn the gender of the child;" "then, if the child is a girl, commit female feticide, aborting their baby because of her gender." "Infanticide was a very horrible, very terrible thing to live with for the rest of your life." "So the medical profession provided an easy, kinder way of killing." "As if killing before birth somehow made it kinder, killing behind an operation theatre table makes it less gory, less bloody." "Now infanticide to a smaller level has occurred throughout history in India, China, and the rest of Southeast Asia." "But when female feticide came, it was so easily socially acceptable." "In the worst of times in history, in Medieval times, not more than 1, 2, 3, 4 percent girl children were killed at birth as infanticide." "But now in modern societies like India and China, 20, 25, 30 percent girls are being killed before birth." "The pressure started the moment they came to know that I'm carrying twins." "The pressure started to get the sex determination test done." "Mitu's husband and his mother demanded Mitu get an illegal sex determination test because they feared the twins would be girls." "When Mitu refused, they locked her in her room." "The next three days I was not given anything to eat or drink." "The only thing that was demanded was that they wanted a sex determination test done and abortion if both babies are females." "My mother-in-law told me this in front of my mother, that for one lac rupees ($2000 USD) we can get one baby killed inside my womb, so if they are girls at least do that." "Usually in such cases where women are pressurized they give in." "They feel like the lesser evil will be to terminate the fetuses, because that way you're protecting your own family, you're protecting your marriage, and at some point in time you can give birth to the so-called son, the one that is wanted," "and in the process they will be one happy story, and the bad stories will be forgotten." "That is why the sex ratio in India has declined." "Knowing Mitu was allergic to eggs, her husband and his mother baked a cake made with eggs and fed it to her." "When Mitu became ill, she had to be taken to the hospital." "There, Mitu's husband and his mother convinced the doctor to secretly perform an ultrasound." "When the doctor did, the ultrasound revealed that Mitu's twins were both girls." "The demands for abortion intensified." "Now there were no demands for sex determination." "Now the demand was for abortion." "In a fit of rage, Mitu's husband pushed her down the stairs." "Then, she was locked in a room" " Injured and bleeding - in hopes she would miscarry." "But Mitu was determined to have her daughters." "She escaped to her parent's house." "Eventually, she gave birth to her twin daughters, though two months premature." "She had not told her parents everything." "Her parents, who are her support group now, she had not even told them." "That's a very common story in India, that women do not tell anybody - and especially in their own families, because being unsuccessful in a marriage is not only about the woman's own status, it's also about her own family's status." "So they would be looked down upon." "There would be a certain amount of social ostracism." "That is why a Dowry Prohibition Act sometimes fails, because a family would rather pay that dowry to keep the marriage, and then have all the violence unleashed on their daughter rather than taking her out from there." "My husband told me that he wants a mutual divorce." "He hates me and he doesn't want to live with me, wants to remarry because he wants to have sons, which I have not given him." "He has not got anything by marrying me." "He has not got dowry, he has not got sons, so according to him I was a useless wife." "He wanted to throw me out." "Then I think she changed from being a victim to a survivor." "I think there was change in her personality at that stage, and that is not at all common." "We have seen a lot of women who probably break the silence, but then they go back." "There is some kind of a compensation by the family, or they have been frightened to go back or they feel it's better not to go out into the public and do this, so they get back with their families." "On 9th of May I filed a complaint to the PNDT department, which bans sex determination." "They didn't take any action on it." "In order to curb the growing practice of female feticide, India passed the Preconception and Prenatal Diagnostic Techniques Act in 1994." "The PCPNDT act made it illegal for a doctor to determine a fetus' gender and for parents to abort a child because she is a girl." "According to the PCPNDT, doctors with ultrasound machines must be registered and are required to report whenever they perform an ultrasound and for what reason." "But many doctors ignore the law." "Families pay these doctors under the table to discover the gender of their child, in order to abort the fetus if it is a girl." "And though such practices are illegal, the government rarely investigates instances when the law is broken." "As a result, sex-selective abortion continues to be common in India." "All together it's a connivance between the family and status of a very disempowered woman." "She can't really say anything and connivances between the family, doctor, and the technology people that is coming together to take away the right to life from the girl children." "For the doctors, the more unethical they are, the greater their income." "Because there's virtually total impunity to the crimes they commit." "No risk of being caught, but enormous profits." "You will hardly hear of any cases where it has been enforced in any state, and there is absolutely no accountability from the top to the bottom." "Today, Mitu continues to plead with the government to prosecute her husband, who forced her to get the illegal ultrasound as well as the doctor who performed it." "Doctors make large sums of money for performing such ultrasounds, though." "And the courts favor doctors and hospitals in such cases." "This fight has been going on for years." "The Chief District Medical Officer, who was supposed to take action and seal the hospital on this, he called me to his office in August." "I, along with Mrs. Bijayalaxmi Nanda, who is a good friend of mine, we went to his office." "And there I was told that," ""What's the problem if your husband wants a son?" "You are young, you can again get pregnant."" "He said, "I'm giving you fatherly advice."" "So I asked him, "Sir, what do you mean by a fatherly advice?" "Does this mean that in the next pregnancy you're asking me to go for a sex determination test?" "Or you mean to say that we women are just machines and we should go on producing children until we get a son?"" "I started receiving threats that I'll be murdered and my daughters will be killed if I do not withdraw the cases." "And eventually on the night duty at 11:30 P.M., one senior doctor came and he threatened me with rape if I do not withdraw the complaints." "What should I do to save my daughters?" "Where do I go from here?" "But the reason I am rushing to the courts is that if all this can happen with an educated woman like me, what is the guarantee my future generations, my daughters will not face the same harassment when they grow up?" "It is 16 years since the act was passed and I am the first complainant, and I am being harassed." "I've been writing to the Prime Minister, to the President, to the Health Minister." "I've been visiting their offices but nothing has come out of it." "Will any other Mitu come forward?" "Now she's mobilized a lot of people on the issue on her own." "She runs her own blogs." "She tells her stories, which is very difficult to break out of the mold and tell your own stories." "She keeps people updated on her own cases." "She's fighting a battle on her own, with her own resources." "And she tries to build up public support." "I think from a victim to a survivor to being the face of a campaign for missing girls," "Mitu is a role model in many ways." "I am yet to see a mother who revels so much and is so happy about just seeing her daughters grow." "I think in that way she is an example." "The female gendercide prevalent in India is also widespread in its neighbor China." "Like India, China is a patriarchal nation with a strong son-preference culture." "But the Chinese government has created a policy, which ultimately encourages gendercide." "In response to fears of overpopulation," "China introduced the One-Child Policy in 1979." "The law restricts most Chinese couples to one child." "Rural families, though, are allowed a second child if their first is a daughter... so they can try for a son." "Enforcement of the policy is strict and harsh." "Families found in violation of the policy may be subject to forced abortion or forced sterilization." "There are people in the village that look for people like me." "They reported me." "Li and her husband lived in a rural village with their two daughters." "They were allowed two children because their first child was a girl." "But their families desperately wanted them to have a son." "So, though it was against the law," "Li and her husband decided to have a third child, in the hopes that it would be a boy." "When they found out that they would be having another girl, their parents told them to get rid of the baby." "Another daughter would do them no good." "But Li and her husband wanted to keep their child." "They called her husband's parents to tell them the third one was going to be a girl." "Then the grandparents told them to abort it." "But Li and her husband said no, they would still have it even if it is a girl." "In China there is a system of paid informants, where women who are illegally pregnant can be informed on by their neighbors, their friends, their co-workers, their supervisors... just walking down the street and looking a little bit bigger." "These are paid informants." "So then, the family planning office keeps track of all these women who are illegally pregnant and then they will have a family planning raid where they will do a sweep of that particular neighborhood and just drag out all the women who are illegally pregnant" "and bring them down to the family planning office and force them all to have abortions." "The Chinese One-Child policy is enforced by the Family Planning Police, a militant order that monitors and arrests families in violation of the policy." "The Family Planning Police heard Li was pregnant with her third child, so they forced their way into her home." "Li was just behind the door." "She was too frightened to move." "It scared her down to the core." "Her heart was pounding hard." "He looked inside the window." "I was sitting against the door." "He didn't see me." "If he had seen me, I would have been taken away, too." "They would have, for sure, fined us and aborted my child." "They wanted my husband to go with them to their office." "He refused to go." "They dragged him to their office." "A few of them yelled at him, and dragged him to the Family Planning Committee office." "At that point, a bunch of people restrained him, more than ten men." "His hands were shaking like this, just shaking like this." "Those men dragged him away as he struggled." "That afternoon, they said they would release him if he paid a 10,000 yuan ($1500 USD) fine." "To save the life of their baby girl," "Li and her husband went into hiding." "Eventually, Li gave birth to their daughter." "But because their child was born illegally, they had to remain hidden." "If you are at home, you can't leave the house." "You will just hide inside the house." "Even if you hide in the house, if they found out, they would still come to your door and take you away." "So, we are too afraid to stay there." "The Family Planning people chased them everywhere." "When she went to her husband's family, the Family Planning people there chased them, also." "They didn't know what to do, so they left at the beginning of this year." "They said that people are coming to catch families with two girls." "Just families that have had two or three girls." "People who had more than two kids will be taken away." "So they fled again." "This time to a distant region, leaving behind their three daughters with different relatives." "Today, Li and her husband work in a distant, far-off factory, earning what they can to send home to provide for their daughters." "They miss their children, but they also understand that if they were to return to their village, they would be arrested and severely punished by the Family Planning Police." "Mom went to work and make money." "She needs to make money so I can go to school." "I miss her so much." "I want my mom to come back." "I don't want her to work anymore." "I told her to abort it, but she insisted on having it." "If she aborted it, first off, less burden." "Secondly, you would be better off with a boy." "She said, "I don't care about the burden." "Even if there were burdens to come, they would be my burdens and not yours."" "I am not with my children, and I can't take care of them." "I worry about them being sick or something like that." "I am thinking about this right now." "I am mostly thinking about my youngest daughter." "She was only five months when I left." "I left her at home." "We just want to work here for a few more years so we can go back and fix our house and take care of our children so that they can live a better life, too." "The One-Child Policy was enforced through financial punishment on parents." "Now, during the 80s these financial punishments implied that parents were denied some of their income to the tune of 10% of income from both parents for 14 years until the child reached 15 years old." "And in recent years, the One-Child Policy punishments have become even more severe..." "Two to three years of family income for parents to have at least one kid." "Some of these parents have decided to have a kid in spite of the policy." "But for many parents, they were forced to choose between a financial punishment they could not afford, or not having a son, which is something they also couldn't deal with." "And so for those parents, they were choosing between financial ruin or engaging in sex-selective abortion." "I have been married for about ten years." "Five years ago, my husband and I got pregnant without much preparation." "Our daughter was an unexpected surprise." "At that time, we didn't prepare very well." "So our hearts were very torn, but since it was our first child, after we accepted it, we put a lot of heart into the whole pregnancy process and her growth afterwards." "Last month, we found out suddenly that I am pregnant (again)." "I am really looking forward to this new life." "On the other hand, this also put a lot of pressure on me." "Because policies are not supportive of it." "Some policies encourage people to report on people, so if someone in the community wants to report you, that person would be able to get some rewards." "Then I might be forced to have an abortion or something." "And my husband's job would be affected, too." "If it's serious I might need to leave my job, because having a second child is against the policy." "Also, if we are going to have the child in China, this child would not have citizenship, which means this child can't go on an airplane or can't leave the country, but can only take the train or drive." "Going to school and other welfare, he won't have these." "Parents would also carry a name on their back, a bad name." "In China, a new population of illegal children are emerging." "These children have no official existence;" "they are ineligible for education and health care." "And when they grow up, they can not officially be married, own land, or hold a job." "They have no future in China." "If you want to have citizenship you need about 200,000 RMB ($31,000 USD)." "First, this money is something that we don't have." "Second, it's not worth it." "In my own family, my dad really hoped for a son, because we have three daughters." "His expectation brought me the same idea, that it would be a really good thing to have a boy." "If I have a boy, people will treat me to a meal;" "if I have a girl I will treat them." "This means you either make money or lose money." "We are worried about policies, money, where should we have the baby, meaning where can we go and have the baby safely so that the baby would not be affected by the policies." "We need to be secretive." "We sometimes will have to hide during my pregnancy." "Things like this are making me stressed." "The Chinese Communist Government has declared, or even boasted, that over the past 30 years of One-Child Policy they have prevented over 400 million lives in China." "That's greater than the entire population of the United States." "They also reported that there are 13 million abortions a year." "That is about 35,000 a day and almost 1,500 an hour." "Many of these abortions are forced abortions, up to the 9th month of pregnancy." "According to the World Health Organization, 500 women a day kill themselves in China and countless more attempt it." "China has the highest female suicide rate of any country in the world." "Could this epidemic of female suicide in China be related to forced abortion, forced sterilization, and female infanticide?" "How does a woman feel about herself as a woman if she has killed her daughter just because she's a girl?" "How does that make her feel about herself?" "How does that make her feel about her own right to live, to draw breath on this earth?" "Right now, we're on the cusp of an explosion in the sex ratio amongst the sexually mature population age groups." "So Chinese marriage markets are on the verge of collapse." "Today in China there are around 37 million more males than females living." "This is often called bare branches." "That means these men will never find wives inside China." "This serious gendercide has caused sex trafficking, prostitution market, and child bride kidnapping." "These bare branches are a growing problem." "Each year, 1.1 million more boys are born than girls in China." "And currently there are 37 million more men than women." "That means there are 37 million fewer women for men to marry." "As finding a woman to marry becomes more and more difficult for men, child trafficking has increased dramatically." "Girls are stolen or purchased by families so they can be secured as future brides for their sons." "My child was playing right outside of the door." "I realized she was missing by 5:30 and I left to look for her at 5:40." "I didn't realize she was missing, because in this place no one has ever been missing before." "When it turned dark, around 8:00, I thought for sure she was missing." "She was very little at the time; she was only two and a half." "Our radio in the village broadcast the news of our child." ""Whichever family that has the child, please take her back home."" "Still there's nothing." "At that time I realized that someone had kidnapped my child for sure." "My spirit was totally collapsed." "I was sitting by the road yelling and crying, where is my child, who took my child away?" "They searched the surrounding villages, handing out fliers with their daughter's picture." "For months there was no sign of her, and the longer she was gone, the more her parents worried." "I saw the picture of my child," "I was wondering if she was cold or wet." "During the day, we went out to look for our child." "At night, we couldn't sleep." "We looked and looked for seven months and seven days." "We did everything we could." "Then someone in another village said she had seen a child looking like the little girl living in a nearby home." "The parents went with the police to the home the caller had reported." "Inside, they found their daughter, healthy and unharmed." "The police arrested the residents who had kidnapped her." "When I found my child," "I realized that my life had changed completely." "After she came back she never played by the door anymore." "We tell her to go play by the door, she said," ""No, I am afraid the bad people would come."" "The couple is believed to have stolen the little girl to provide a future bride for their son." "It's estimated that there are approximately 70,000 children every year that are stolen away from their parents and trafficked to other parents, who have not been able to have a second child through the birth process, so they want to traffic a child into their families." "In our place, a lot of people have lost girls." "I have two girls." "I don't believe in son preference." "This is my own child." "How can I abandon her just because she is a girl?" "That's impossible, completely impossible." "After my child was lost, I swore that I would never give up until I found my child." "In our area, all the missing children are girls." "Most families want brides for their sons, but few families want daughters for themselves." "Because of this, hundreds of thousands of baby girls are orphaned or abandoned in China each year." "That day, I was going to the Lontou Street to buy chickens." "I went walking along the river." "My son told me that the water had risen." "I found some wooden boxes along the river." "I picked one up and left." "I didn't notice till on the way back that there was a baby wrapped in some rugged cloth in the box." "I wondered immediately, is this baby alive or dead." "I decided not to buy chickens any more." "I need to take a look at this baby." "I opened the box to see if the baby was still alive." "I thought if the baby was dead, forget it, I would just throw it away." "I told my husband what happened." "He was sleeping, but hearing I brought back an abandoned baby, he jumped up in anger and told me I can't take the baby." "Doctors cut the baby's umbilical cord and washed her off." "She looked pretty small and she was a newborn because she still had her uncut umbilical cord." "She was wrapped and put in a box." "I asked the security guard; he didn't want to take it either." "He said just throw the baby into the trashcan." "I scolded him that he was picked up from a trashcan." "He said how can I work if I take the baby." "They asked me who wanted to take this baby." "I said, I picked this baby up, I would raise her." "I am the kind of person who takes all kinds of responsibilities." "When I see lost chickens, I bring them home, too." "I thought I will raise her up, that's it," "I won't give her to anyone else, not even the police!" "If they come and take the baby I will kill myself in front of them." "When my mom first brought Meihui home," "I did not think about adopting her, yet." "So, my mom took care of 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."