Thank Heaven for Little Girls

I've never liked the lyrics of Chevalier's song from Gigi. It does not make my best of list, in fact, it ranks in the bottom ten for me. First, I find it, and the movie, a bit dodgy and frankly kind of disturbing.  Second, I happen to have a, well not so, little girl living in our home, and while I am incredibly proud of the young lady she is becoming, part of me does not want her to hang around with "little boys."  I know, I can be accused of being the over protective father.  Guilty on all charges.

Last night, we were putting away the Christmas tree and decorations. Yes, it was four days late, but what are you going to do?  Anyway, as I was pulling off ornaments I took the time to look at each.  This one was given when she was 10, you remember that fascination with Harry Potter?  That one, she was five and just discovered soccer.  The one over there has her picture at four, she picked it out for me, and it says "The Bestest Daddy Ever".  The year she gave it to me, she also picked out one for the dog. It has a picture of our now departed collie, Samson, and the caption "The Best Dog Ever".  That must have been the year of the "best ever."  So, there I was putting ornaments away reminiscing on how the years do flow quickly by, thinking of how proud I am of her, and how much she has changed my life in the past 15 years.

In the 1990s movie Hook, Peter Pan (Robin Williams), has to learn to fly again.  In order to do so he needs to have a happy thought.  The happy thought that makes him fly? You guessed it, becoming a Daddy.

A very happy thought indeed.

So, after an evening of reminiscing, I stumbled across this article in The New Atlantis this morning.  The article, in a nutshell, describes the situation in which millions of baby girls have gone missing from the demographics of the world due to sex selective procedures and their perceived lack of value.

Over the past three decades the world has come to witness an ominous and entirely new form of gender discrimination: sex-selective feticide, implemented through the practice of surgical abortion with the assistance of information gained through prenatal gender determination technology. All around the world, the victims of this new practice are overwhelmingly female — in fact, almost universally female. The practice has become so ruthlessly routine in many contemporary societies that it has impacted their very population structures, warping the balance between male and female births and consequently skewing the sex ratios for the rising generation toward a biologically unnatural excess of males. This still-growing international predilection for sex-selective abortion is by now evident in the demographic contours of dozens of countries around the globe — and it is sufficiently severe that it has come to alter the overall sex ratio at birth of the entire planet, resulting in millions upon millions of new “missing baby girls” each year. In terms of its sheer toll in human numbers, sex-selective abortion has assumed a scale tantamount to a global war against baby girls.

A very sobering thought indeed.  Lord, have mercy!

A little over 15 years ago my life was changed by a happy thought, a new life, a name, a little girl.  She is a blessing.  Thank God for little girls!