The horror of free choice
On my way to work I like to sit back and relax reading the Economist. It is a positive and pleasant experience almost every time but not today.
I read two articles that shook my every believe in modern society to the core. I’m always the person to try to observe the rights of everyone. Not that I always succeed but if you know me closely you would know that I care about issues like human, civil and animal rights.
I’ve kept repeating in every conversation I’ve had on the topic in the last ten years that anyone should be allowed to choose what they want to do, who they want to be and how they want to live. Free choice was my mantra.
The horrifying articles I read today, however, let me see what a total freedom of free choice could mean to society and humanity. It could destroy them. I cannot believe I’m saying that, but apparently it could.
The articles called “Gendercide” (a leader) and “Gendercide – the worldwide war on baby girls” (if you like you can look them up here and here, although I should warn you that the page requires subscription). One of the articles starts with a story told by the Chinese writer Xinran Xue who witnesses the killing of a baby girl in a local village directly after its birth. They just through the baby in the trash because it is not a boy. And that is not because they bad people and hate girls. They just cannot afford to have girls, they need boys because boys can do hard work.
” ‘It is not a child’, she corrected me. ‘It’s a girl baby, and we can’t keep it. Around these parts, you can’t get without a son. Girl babies don’t count.’ ”
According to the articles, 100 million girls have been killed or aborted in China and India so far. And it does not happen just in the villages. In big cities, rich families which want to have just one or two kids and prefer to have sons than daughters often decide to abort the unwanted baby girls and wait for a boy. How does that happen? Well, there is ultrasound — the miracle of modern medicine which can tell a young mother whether she has to buy blue or pink cloths for the little toddler. Except in many cases the pink clothing is just unnecessary, ’cause they have abortion doctors who would allow you to wait for the blue.
Many have blamed the China one-child policy for the gender discrepancy in the country, but the boys-to-girls ratio is getting so big that it cannot be just because of that or due to lack of education. Women in many well-educated, rich families in India for example will decide to abort a girl and wait for a boy. Why? I’ll quote Economist here:
“In fact the destruction of baby girls is a product of three forces: the ancient preference for sons; a modern desire for smaller families; and ultrasound scanning and other technologies that identify the sex of the fetus.”
So, it all comes to that. A family makes the choice to have a son, the free choice, because they just follow they believes and desires, and 20 years from now we have 30-40 million young males more than young females in China. 30-40 million males who would never have the opportunity to marry and have kids because there are not enough women in their country. They would have to immigrate if they wanted a family. According to the Economist, 40 million are the males below 20 years of age in the entire United States. What do you do with that?!
And all because some families followed their dreams to have a boy.
The paper recommends a solution — promoting females as able members of society, more discussion on women rights and more examples of valuing females, so the “son preference would seem old-fashioned and unnecessary” after a while.
I’m still astonished how making a personal choice about your own life could affect so many people…
One of the questions raised by that is whether the individual has a responsibility for all the people his or her personal choices can affect, or do we only have to be responsible for ourselves and a small group of friends and relatives. It is astonishing that simple personal preferences can have such a massive effect, but does that mean that we have to do things just because other (strange) people depend indirectly on our decisions?