“I bet you are hoping for a boy this time!” I’ve heard this or some variant a hundred times in the last four months. Its hard for me to hear this and since I find it rather offensive, its easy for me to express my dissimilar desire saying something like, “No, actually both of us are leaning towards wanting another girl this time, although we will be absolutely happy with a boy too.” Believe it or not, sometimes even this tidily amount of honesty is difficult for me to actually say out loud.
To digress for a moment, I didn’t start this pregnancy out leaning one way or another. But, you can read about that here: Desiring Daughters (and Sons)
These comments have come from strangers, acquaintances, friends and family. The far reaching assumption that everyone must deeply desire a son, especially anyone sonless and pregnant for a third time, continues to surprise and sadden me.
To be perfectly honest, the comments also scare me. Almost every time I hear them it makes me think of little baby girls being aborted or killed after birth or left to die in a field or allowed to live a resented, unappreciated, unloved life believing and being told they would have been better off as a boy. I don’t think this fear and sadness are from left-field considering what has happened to baby girls for centuries and is continuing to escalate in cultures where a preference for male children is especially strong. Third pregnancies can be especially deadly for little unborn girls. In Beijing municipality, almost 3 boys are born for every baby girl in third pregnancies.
Gendercide is something I find myself wanting to bring up every time someone makes an assumption of a preference for a boy-baby. I’m pretty sure my current response is more loving even though my husband would probably disagree with me. According to him, complete and total honesty is always more loving, but I’m in the tact-over-truth camp myself. I value truth, when it can be tactfully expressed. The problem is that tact usually takes more time and more words than most situations will allow which leaves me leaving my tactful-truths for another time or more likely for never.
I’m not the only one, I know, who likes to imagine what I could have said. Since I know that this will not be the last time that I get one of these remarks, maybe I should practice some thought provoking responses that might not be taken offensively.
I could say something like, “Did you know that 20 years ago it was estimated that already 100 million baby girls were missing due to this preference for boys.” Or maybe something a little less direct, “Did you see last week’s Economist? Its got a number of fascinating articles and horrifying statistics on gendercide.” Neither of these are super-duper tactful in my opinion. But, they make me feel better imagining that I’d said them.
Although there are many isolated incidents of male gendercide, which are absolutely terrifying, female gendercide in our day seems to be much more wide spread, touching a number of countries and cultures including pockets in the U.S. With the far-reaching, centuries-old persistent preference for boys, a modern cultural belief in the superiority of small families, and an ever increasing availability for sex-determining ultrasound equipment, baby girl births are significantly outnumbered by baby boy births in many of these regions.
It is funny and yet not too surprising that I feel I need to get all these thoughts out before I find out the sex of this baby. Which happens on Thursday! If it is a boy, I think my thoughts and maybe even my feelings might be redirected and I want to write all of this out before so that I can look back and remember.
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