Born to die: the tragedy of being born the "wrong" gender.

CHINA: August 2000--The Huang family already had three children when the mother became pregnant again. "Family planning" officials seized the house and ordered the father to kill his newborn son, who he instead attempted to hide. Officials found the baby and drowned him in a rice paddy, in front of his parents.

CHINA: February 15, 2001--A newborn girl, her naked body still warm, lies dead in the gutter alongside a road in a email town in Hunan province. She clearly has been dumped and has just died. On their way to work most passers by ignore the child. Some stop to stare and then walk on. Life goes on as normal. Eventually an elderly man puts the tiny body into a box and carries it away.

In researching the phenomenon of female infanticide as practiced in China and elsewhere, I sat down with Dr. William Zinker, one of the foremost scholars on China studies and female infanticide. I pressed the "record" button on my mini-cassette voice recorder and began to tape his words.

   In China, the main cause of infanticide is government regulations. Only one
   child per couple in cities is permissible and two in the countryside if
   they are born at least three years apart. Traditionally, males are more
   significant in China because they are expected to support their parents, as
   a type of insurance policy that will abet their parents in old age. Females
   do not have the same usefulness, so, therefore, to eschew paying fines to
   the government, parents kill their female offspring. The impact is great.
   Female infanticide is not merely a moral cause. In fact, through my
   research and other historical data, it has been concluded that the gender
   gap in China could have calamitous consequences in the long run.

His eyes were a light blue. Cold. Emotionless. I fought to keep my own eyes open as his monotone and big SAT words threatened to induce sleep. I wished he wasn't so dispassionate, so bookish. I didn't come to learn all these facts, statistics, cause and effect. I wanted more. I wanted to feel.

Ironically, I'd met Matrika, a young woman from India, through Dr. Zinker. She had first-hand experience of the tragedy of female infanticide. And on a sunny evening in late May, searching for the feelings and emotions that Dr. Zinker and my own research hadn't fulfilled, I interview her to discover what it really means--beyond the numbers, the statistics, and the cold facts.

Her tremendous, dark brown eyes stare back at me. With jet-black hair pulled back into a tight bun and eyebrows thick and dark, she's barely five-foot-two and has a slender, childlike body. Her lips are dainty, painted a deep brown, and her voice is just as delicate--almost a whisper. I lean forward in my chair to hear.

"I was sixteen. I was educated but homely," she tells me. "I was poor and burden to my brothers. Two weeks after my seventeenth birthday, I must marry. The boy, his parents come to my house to watch me walk, sit, sing, laugh. I feel ashamed and scared. They look at me with eyes--monster eyes--and ask my mother if I cook. I can. I go to college? I had forced brothers to let me go to local college. And then they ask big question: my price--how much my family give for me to be married?"

Matrika has three frown lines on her forehead. Upon close examination, there is something about her face that betrays her smile. I realize what it is: the lines on her face summarize her life. There is hardness in her face that comes only from tripping and falling in life, and yet, although she is a quite ordinary woman, there is something very beautiful about the pain in her face. Am I making my examination too obvious? I wonder, and quickly look away and stare at my lap. She doesn't seem to notice.

"My father died when my eldest brother thirteen and I fifteen," she goes on. "We were poor, very poor. But boy's side wanted dowry. My mother sold all her jewelry, wedding ring, everything."

She sits there, right in front of me, but in her mind's eye she's far, far away. She seems to be speaking to herself. It's clear to me she is reliving her memories. I am merely a casual observer; I feel no longer part of the setting--the cold living room, the interview. Reciting number six of my "questions to ask," I query, "What about your wedding night? How did you feel? What thoughts were running through your mind?" She looks up as if just noticing there is someone else in the room, and I feel a sharp pang of discomfort at my prying.

"It was longest night of life ... or the longest walk," she replies. She pauses then, as if waiting for a response from me. But what can I say--"Yes, it was, even though I don't know what you're talking about"? I realize that she's still really speaking to herself, recalling the past that has been imprinted indelibly in her soul and reflects in her dazed eyes.

"The wedding guests very happy," Matrika continues. "Everyone dress in pretty clothes. They dancing and laughing. Me--no. I face life. I think--think too much. My mother-in-law, she laugh at my little dowry. She be mean to me. What if I have daughter? I have to kill her like other women? If the dowry little, only I live in shame. But if I no give my husband boy, I would bring shame to the family."

My fingers ache from attempting to write down all of her words. My yellow notebook is filled with shorthand notes in black ink.

We sat in his muggy office. His massive desk was cluttered with paperwork. Not wanting to be obvious, I quickly glanced at the clock hanging next to his numerous certificates and plaques. It was 4:00 PM. He'd been lecturing for more than an hour:

   Besides ethical affairs, there could be other potential problems in China,
   India, Korea, or Taiwan due to female infanticide. One outcome that is
   taking place now is importing women. They are not imported as brides
   because foreign women are considered inferior. Instead the women become
   prostitutes.

     By studying historical data, another effect proposed is a bachelor
   revolt. The men who cannot get a woman will group together as small-scale
   bandits and cause a rebellion. China openly admits it has eighty million
   adult males who will never marry. Many of these men live on all-male
   "bachelor farms."

     The native women are married at younger and younger ages, some as young
   as twelve or thirteen. The older generation of men robs the younger men of
   wives, so obviously the younger men will eventually have to do the same
   thing. At times women are kidnapped, stolen, and bought and then sold on
   the open market. In order to get the money to buy these brides, men often
   go to other countries for work, which creates further problems.

A daughter is burden in village," Matrika tells me. "Parents grow her and then give her to husband. Daughter takes family's money to pay for dowry. Sons are provider; they give for the family."

Fidgeting with her cotton, navy-blue sash, she only peers up at me at the end of each sentence. The sun has gone down outside, but I only half-consciously notice. The room seems a bit darker. I want to ask her about her child but am not sure how to broach the subject. How does one pose such a question? I try to hint at it by asking, "What happened after the marriage?"

Her gaze falls to the glass table between us, to her lap, to the table, and back to her lap again. There is dead silence at first. Then she slowly says, "My daughter born. She beautiful, healthy. Husband is sad. He want son. He drink too much whiskey. He break my teeth. I run to brother's house but come back home when husband say sorry."

She hugs herself and is crying. I don't know what to say, so I say nothing. She rocks back and forth. I try to look away but can't. Then she continues, "I already have one daughter, so when I have second baby girl, I kill her."

I shiver. She weeps. The power of the statement lingers in the air.

"The neighbors come to see me," Matrika continues. "They see it is girl and tell me to let it die. They know we can't afford to grow one more girl. Husband say leave it in street. I keep child but my husband hit me more. Brother can't help me and my daughter. We totally dependent on husband. Where I go? What I do?"

Inside me, something breaks. This is freakin' disgusting! I think. What's wrong with this woman? I'm left bewildered. How could this woman sitting right in front of me have committed such an atrocity? What kind of a person slaughters someone they have created? As these questions whirl in my brain I recall something I read one night on the Internet.

It was midnight and, as I sat facing my dusty Dell computer, I had typed "female infanticide" into the Yahoo! search engine and then double-clicked on "Cover-up of China's Gender-cide" by Joseph Farah. According to him: "More than fifty million women were estimated to be `missing' in China because of the institutionalized killing and neglect of girls due to Beijing's population control program that limits parents to one child." This gendercide is the biggest holocaust in human history, he writes.

Whoa. The numbers begin to be significant now; they start to have meaning.

For three days, I no give baby milk," Matrika continues. "Baby cry. Village woman queeze water from tree, mix with oil, and force down baby throat." She pauses. Her eyes are red and she clutches the sash tightly in a clenched fist and stares down into her lap. It's so silent I can hear the clock ticking. Already guessing the answer, I prompt, "And then? What happened to the baby?"

"The baby have blood from nose and die," she replies. "Neighbors make small hole near house. Baby go in hole."

From outside comes the sound of a dog barking.

As if reading my mind, she asserts, "I no think bad or good. Daughter ... burden.

How I grow one more? I sad. Baby no sad."

How could you have done this? my brain shouts. My muscles tighten and I want to shake her and scream, "What right do you have to be alive?" Instead I just sit there.

"I stay with husband," she continues. "I try forget other daughter. I join group." Nodding, I try to conceal my rage.

Matrika had joined a woman's group supported by the Pache Trust. Being in the group has given her time to reflect upon what drove her to kill her baby daughter. She realizes that she was forced into that position and did what she felt was right at the time--just as thousands of other women do. But she also realizes what a crime it was and how important it is to reach out to other women facing similar situations.

She watches me through watery eyes--like a little kid who has done something wrong. I feel compassionate, yet I'm still furious. I want to get up and slap her. Then again, when I see the torture in her face, I want to get up and hug her, tell her how brave she is and how unfair all of it was. Instead I stare back and cry.

Hastily, wiping tears with the back of her hand, she affirms proudly, "I start little business, now money for daughter and me. I tell other women fight for daughters' right to survive."

As I look back, I must acknowledge that I am constantly shocked at how desensitized the world is to such issues as female infanticide. For example, in the incident of the dead Chinese child left in a gutter, people were so desensitized to cruelty that they didn't even stop to help. They merely stopped to stare or walked by, ignoring the dying infant. In Matrika's case, family and neighbors encouraged her to kill her daughter--in fact, it would be culturally wrong not to.

In the United States, we are constantly bombarded with statistics, facts, and figures in the newspapers or on the evening news or in professors' sterile lectures. But all these cold facts are just that: cold facts. Humanism, a philosophy motivated by compassion, affirms the dignity of human beings. Through this philosophy we must feel so that we begin to care about this international concern, about suffering that has no borders.

Shanam Saini of Santa Clara, California, is seventeen years old. Her article placed first in the thirteen-to-seventeen-year-old age category of the 2001 Humanist Essay Contest for Young Women and Men of North America.

RELATED ARTICLE: CONCERNED ABOUT THE POPULATION CRISIS?

Here are some organizations working to alleviate the problem of global overpopulation:

* Engenderhealth 440 Ninth Avenue New York, NY 10001 Works to expand worldwide access to voluntary and safe clinic-based contraception

* Imagine a World of Wanted/ Nurtured Children P.O. Box 1001 San Jacinto, CA 92581 Works toward reducing population levels and ensuring quality of life

* International Planned Parenthood Federation--Western Hemisphere 902 Broadway New York, NY 10010 Ties together the forty-five national groups in the Western Hemisphere; gives direct aid to those in Latin America

* Pathfinder Fund 9 Galen Street Watertown, MA 02172 Helps fund strategic and pioneering family planning projects

* Population Communications International 777 United Nations Plaza New York, NY 10017 Encourages and assists governments and businesses abroad to develop television and radio drama that encourages family planning

* The Population Institute 107 Second Street NE Washington, DC 20002 Educates Congress, the media, and citizens on the seriousness of the population explosion and works toward decreasing birth rates worldwide

* Zero Population Growth 1400 16th Street NW Suite 320 Washington, DC 20036 Educates government and citizens on the dangers of population growth