The Female Infanticide Capitol of India…

As we continued to drive, at one point Raj turned to me and said, “look out the window… you see this place? This entire district (Madurai) has the highest incidence of female infanticide in India.” So I looked out the window and noticed how remarkably few women I saw walking around. See, here in India, if your wife bears you a daughter, your rationale goes something like this: “Well, we don’t really have enough food to go around as it is, so she’ll be hungry her whole life while she’s in our house. Plus, we’ll have to clothe her and care for her, which again, will be a significant drain on our already limited resources. Then we’ll have to raise a dowry for her to marry her off (a sizeable sum equaling up to $3 – 5,000, even for a poor family), and in the end, she won’t be able to help us when we are old and frail (that’s the son’s job… a daughter’s job is to take care of her husband’s family, not her own). So really, it’s better for everyone (including the baby), if we just give her a hug, take her down to the river, and then hold her under until she stops breathing.” I’m not trying to be melodramatic or unnecessarily graphic, and i hope that you’ll forgive me if such seems to be the case. Rather, I just had no idea (until a couple of years ago when I started coming to India with Rob) that such things still happen in the world, but they do. And we were driving through the middle of it. I had a hard time sorting through the emotions, and still do. Rage, helplessness, sorrow, hope (yeah, even hope… as Jesus comes into these communities, things like this atrocity stop) and amazement. And the more people (like all of us) who know about it, the better the chances that it won’t continue much longer as we pray, serve, engage and support the work of the men and women who are planting churches in areas like this.