From the BBC:
Doctors in China have discovered 26 sewing needles embedded in the body of a 31-year-old woman.
They think they were inserted into Luo Cuifen's body when she was a baby by grandparents upset she was not a boy.
Some of these needles have penetrated vital organs, such as the lungs, liver and kidneys. One has even broken into three pieces in the woman's brain.
Presumably, this was a failed attempt at female infanticide. Because of the one child policy, there is a preference among Chinese couples for boys over girls, as only boys carry on the family name. Hence, female infanticide and sex-specific abortion are still practised widely, especially in rural parts of the country.
This has led to an imbalance in the ratio of males to females. In 1997, that ratio was 131: 100 in some parts of the country, compared to 105: 100 worldwide. A World Health Organization report, published in the same year, estimated that more than 50 million women were "missing" from the female population.
Comments (8)
The 131:100 sounded alarmingly high so I looked around and it is *way* off. The only cite I saw online for the high number was a Telegraph article (http://tinyurl.com/2ggrhx) suitable for scaring statisticians on Halloween. 131:100 appears to be the ratio from one small region. China's male:female birth ratio is about 106:100, far from the normal ratio.
Posted by: Jim Lund | September 7, 2007 11:01 AM