For anyone who wants to whine about the wait for China....

[kyburg]

It can take as long as it has to. If this is part of the reason....

"Legal abortions are commonplace for Chinese families in the one-child era. Moreover, with ultrasound machines allowing parents to determine gender at 4-5 months, many first-time pregnancies are aborted if the fetus is female. This selective (and illegal) practice is the result of China's traditional preference for sons; here and in other Asian cultures, brides migrate to husbands' families, leaving their own parents to fend for themselves in old age. Because of this, parents covet male babies. In the one-child era, as many as 40 million baby girls have been selectively aborted - creating a gender gap that has left millions of men with little hope of finding wives. And while the black market for male children remains robust, there is a growing demand for girls as well."

Adoption from China began as a way to assist the abandoned. Period. Lose sight of that, and you lose sight of how the whole issue begins...and is now morphing into something even more awful.

Something that is now hitting children of both genders.

Comments

[amilyn.livejournal.com]

What. A. Mess. And is there ANYONE who did not see this coming in, like, 1980-1982-ish?

it's so terribly sad.

[dawnspring.livejournal.com]

This is not new news, sadly. I remember reading an article in Time (or Newsweek, cant remember which) a few years back that followed a girl trying to escape China and come to the US because her parents tried to sell her to a village to be a brood mare of sorts. It's becoming more common in the remote villages which have no brides for their sons to send someone into the city to find someone who is willing to sell their daughter, then to give her a bunch of false identities so she can 'marry' every guy in the village and be a baby factory. What kills me is even in that situation they still want boys. The government is aware and trying to crack down on it, but it's chard because of the locations of the villages practicing this.

It's something like one female to ever 250 males under the age of 25 in China right now, possibly more. And young Chinese women don't want to marry. They want to be in the work force and make their own way. It's really bad. I have to admit I was surprised when you said you were adopting a boy. I thought it would be easier to adopt a girl than a boy from China.

[kyburg.livejournal.com]

He's coming from Taiwan - similar ethnicity, but not the same culturally or socially. That's the whole difference.

Also, his adoption plan had very different origins - he wasn't abandoned, he was placed by the people who had legal custody of him. Frankly, this borders on an open adoption - if I can convince the players to stay interested in him, that is.

[kyburg.livejournal.com]

Head, meet sand. That's all they saw coming.

[unclemilo.livejournal.com]

That's so sad... though I have heard of such things before, but everytime I read about these kind of horrors, it just leaves me empty...

[sun-berry.livejournal.com]

it is so sad it hurts

[kip-w.livejournal.com]

The whole process is fraught with sad sidelights. It's hard to believe, when I see how happy Sarah is now, but her neverending stories about things she did with her parents in China point to a feeling of loss that doesn't go away.

(Note: she was left at Feixi when she was a day or so old, as far as we know. Logic suggests she has a brother in China, and there could be a sister out there somewhere. We'll just never find out.)

[moropus.livejournal.com]

Does the Chinese government have any idea what they are going to do about the female shortage? I've heard tales like yours, also tales of young girls being kidnapped and never seen again and so on. Real problem here.

[dawnspring.livejournal.com]

There is a proposed law that would let citizens in rural areas be allowed to have a second child without penalty if their first one is a girl. Also, a few years ago there was a crackdown on abortion clinics and a law was passed that made selective abortion of a girl illegal.

Beyond that, I have no idea what the government plans to do. But seeing as their goal all along was to bring about a baby bust in order to keep the population from exploding, I'd say they did a better job than expected.

[oberstein.livejournal.com]

It's 3am-ish as I write this, but I must say, it's all fun and games until they realize they're neck-deep in a sausagefest.

[kyburg.livejournal.com]

It's the way this experiment in sociology keeps mutating that both scares and fascinates me.