Liberalguy

Let’s hear it for the girls
By Rachel Raskin-Zrihen (bio)

When is being two-faced a good thing? Evidently, when it’s a god thing.

The Associated Press reported recently that a baby with two faces was born in a northern Indian village, where she is being worshipped as the reincarnation of a Hindu goddess.

The baby, Lali, apparently has an extremely rare condition known as craniofacial duplication, where a single head has two faces, according to the report, which notes that except for her ears, all of Lali’s facial features are duplicated — she has two noses, two pairs of lips and two sets of eyes.

She’s reportedly healthy, and “drinks milk from her two mouths and opens and shuts all the four eyes at one time,” the article says.

It is probably a really good thing for Lali that she was born in India where they revere Durga, the Hindu goddess of valor, a fiery deity traditionally depicted with three eyes and many arms.

There are other cultures in the world in which a child with so obvious a difference, would be considered an abomination and likely killed, possibly along with the family that produced her.

But Lali has already become a source of religious pilgrimage, as up to 100 people come to touch her feet out of respect every day, offer money and receive blessings, the story says. And the village chief plans to build a temple to Durga, according to the piece.

Lali’s uniqueness may be even more of a blessing than her parents know, judging from another recent AP story from India about babies.

This one notes that girl babies are being aborted at an alarming rate in that country. That despite India’s rush to “leap headfirst into the globalized world,” it still holds tightly to a preference for boys.

The article adds that by 2001, researchers estimated India had anywhere from 20 million to 40 million “missing” girls from sex-selective abortions made available through the spread of ultrasound technology.

But as India modernizes — as villages become small towns, towns become cities and “as India’s once-overwhelming poverty is slowly supplanted by an increasingly educated middle class that wants fewer children” — researchers say the problem is worsening, according to AP writer Gurinder Osan.

Researchers once thought education and wealth would dampen the preference for boys, but the reverse has happened, according to the story.

UNICEF evidently reports about 7,000 fewer girls than expected are born daily in India and the British medical journal The Lancet, reports up to a half million female fetuses are being aborted annually, according to the story.

Despite dramatic changes throughout India, the rationale for preferring boys remains unchanged — boys don’t need the dowries that can financially cripple a family, they stay home after marrying and help care for aging parents, and Hinduism dictates that only sons can light their parents’ funeral pyres.

The shortage of potential brides has done nothing to make girls seem more valuable, according to the story, and the long term effects of this are unknown.

In a country like the United States, where equal pay for equal work, domestic violence, sexist attitudes and a glass ceiling that is already under serious strain are the most pressing problems facing the female gender, a culture in which the sex that produces life is so undervalued is difficult to understand. At least for me.

But India isn’t alone. I understand that in China there’s a one-child-per-family law, meant to cut down on that country’s population explosion, that’s fueled a horrendous rash of female infanticide.

I wonder what they’re going to do in those countries when they start running out of girls… have each girl marry more than one man? Have men battle to the death for breeding rights?

Obviously those nations’ governments need to get busy changing attitudes.