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Throwing the Baby Out with the Bathwater

© Susan Colebank

In the new issue of Marie Claire, an article on women in China shows the despairing vision of a baby girl, no more than a few weeks old, laying dead in the gutter. Even more gut-wrenching than this is the photos of men, women and children ignoring this child that is in plain sight.

What is the purpose of this article, you may ask yourself. To disgust you thoroughly enough to write a resounding letter to the editor that will appear completely edited and cleaned up in a future issue? No, the article is about the one-child limit that is set for the over-populated country of China. I used to be a firm believer in population control, but not if it comes down to babies that are discarded on the side of the street. However, it will never be a baby boy that is thrown out. Even in a country as strict as China with its one-child rule, if the first child born to a couple is a girl, they can try again for another child. Girls are nothing more than inconvenient rag dolls and are no more important than the family pig.

For a magazine that is marketed as a woman's fashion magazine, it definitely packs a wallop through the unexpected pictures and stories it features. I'm sure the magazine will get plenty of letters, even quite a few subscription cancellations, but the image of that little girl is imprinted in my mind. Never again will I blindly accept and blithely toss around acceptance of population control. Birth control, yes. Genocide, no.

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