'It's a Girl'

7 OCT 2013 (original Patch post date)

The documentary, “It’s a Girl,” starts with a nice, bucolic scene in India, but the voiceover quickly sets another tone, as the camera focuses on a woman in a bright red sari. “This Indian woman has killed eight of her baby girls.”

The woman asks, “Why keep girls when raising them would be difficult?”

She smiles as she talks about strangling a baby. The narrator says the woman continued getting pregnant in hopes of having a son, but each time gave birth to a daughter, and each time killed the newborn.

“Women have the power to give life and to take it away,” the woman also says.

This story plays out to varying degrees in the patriarchal countries of India and China, according to the filmmaker. Around the world, the average gender ratio is 105 male babies to 100 female babies. But in certain areas of India and China, that ratio is as high as 140 boys to 100 girls.

In the world’s two most populated countries, we learn in the film, boys are favored, and daughters are “drains on resources.” In India, families are expected to deliver dowries for daughters even though India outlawed the dowry system in 1961. As well, sex selection was banned in 1994, but there’s limited enforcement of both laws; the dowry culture and preference for male babies prevail.

According to the film, females are aborted, killed upon birth or abandoned, with India and China eliminating more girls yearly than are born in the United States. Those that live often are neglected, abused or murdered (estimated 100,000 women in India) for not producing sons or because their new families are unhappy with the dowries.

Says author and activist Rita Banerji, “It is like the female becomes one of the inadvertent pawns in this resource exchange in a patriarchy, so you can buy her, sell her, keep her or kill her – however you want; it’s like with any resource. That is the complete dehumanization of females.

“Dowry, infanticide and feticide go hand in hand. The minute dowry enters a community, everyone becomes greedy for dowry. They think this is another way of getting a huge amount of money,” Banerji continues.

The second half of the documentary addresses China, which has had a one-child policy since 1979. There are policy exceptions, including for rural families, who are allowed a second child if the first is female.

The film presents a rural couple with two daughters. Knowing it was against the law, they chose to become pregnant with a third child, still hoping for a boy. Born in secrecy, the third child also is female. Ultimately the couple flee to avoid punishment from the family planning police and end up as factory workers 1,000 miles away from their children, with resources so limited they only can return home once a year to see their children.

The film also profiles an urban couple who has one child and also chooses to become pregnant again. As portrayed in the film, having a second child that’s not permitted by policy means that child does not have Chinese citizenship and the related benefits. To obtain citizenship would require a significant outlay of cash (which this particular couple did not have). Ultimately, the child is born abroad, with the help of an intervening agency, and given a foreign passport.

The China portion of the film is less impactful than the first half. Given it seems to be well understood that ramifications may be quite harsh for not following policy, the choices the couples made seem poor, particularly for the first couple who ended up separated from their children when a choice not to have a third child would have kept them at home where they could care for their two children. The second couple’s story made me think “birth tourism” and provided new insight on why so many Chinese opt for that route in the U.S. (not that the U.S. should have the function as the overflow release valve for other countries).

As the filmmaker has said, this film raises more questions than it answers. I think likely the Western mind – certainly mine – cannot comprehend cultures that place so little value on life and are so preoccupied with birthing males. Again, from my Western perspective, a huge mind-shift needs to occur in these male-centric countries that places higher value on life and smaller families.

The film doesn’t, for me, adequately explore that China and India are both overpopulated and how that might further contribute to this horrible gendercide. The film’s only mention of why the one-child policy came into existence in China is a vague “fears of overpopulation.”

In reality, it wasn’t fear of overpopulation in China; it was overpopulation in China. Famine resulted in the deaths of an estimated 20 to 45 million Chinese between the late 1950s and early 60s. Prior to the implementation of the policy, the government did encourage birth control and smaller families, but ultimately decided the policy was needed. While many – including the Chinese government – say that a China with 1.4 billion is preferable to a China with 1.8 billion, the filmmaker does not seem to support that view.

That said, turning to such a controlled policy has created ugly, unintended consequences – child trafficking, stolen children (a shortage of girls has led to taking children as future wives for boys – yes, crazy!) and hundreds of thousands of abandoned female babies – a cautionary tale of not addressing population before it reaches unsustainable levels.

We can trot out the current thinking among populationists that the answer to reducing population growth is empowering girls and women through education – educating girls delays marriage and creates better mothers when and if they choose to become mothers – and making birth control accessible.

But watching this film highlights the many complexities and cultural challenges so extreme and entrenched that simply “educating girls” doesn’t seem like it will be nearly enough to change course in the two most populated countries on the planet.

Listen to the filmmaker at TedX Talks.

Watch the film trailer here.